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Similarities between French and Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6665 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes  Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 17 of 18 04 March 2008 at 4:56am | IP Logged | ||
Because not all words in the Romance languages are from Latin. Some of these words might have been created later, thus replacing an already existing word. Or they might have been taken from another language. It also happens that a certain word was derived from different Latin roots in different languages. The best way to find out is to look up those words in an etymological dictionary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6151 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 18 of 18 04 March 2008 at 5:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Marc. Thanks for the tip. I came across this,
A word as common as rabbit or lapin in French (also a term of endearment: “mon petit lapin”) is just an etymological mystery in practically all European languages. In fact, there is no Indo-European root to name our fluffy bunny! In Latin we had, on the one hand, the word cuniculus (Sp. conejo, It. coniglio, Port. coelho, Old French conin and conil, English cony (as in Coney Island), German Kaninchen. But we don’t know the origin of cuniculus. In Latin we had the word lepus, which gave the word lièvre (hare in English), that’s all. The word cuniculus, it has been suggested, was borrowed from pre-Roman Iberic with a sense of underground gallery, den. In other words, the rabbit was defined as an animal living underground. Men (as opposed to women) being who they are, very early in historical philology, the French form conin and conil lended themselves to sexual jokes. You simply need to think of the proximity with the word cunnus in Latin, which gave in French the word con ,(a taboo word, reduced nowadays to the meaning of jerk). Hence, in French, the word conin was abandoned in exchange for the word lapin, the origin of which we know also nothing! It’s only in the XIVth century that appeared the words lapin and lapereau (young rabbit), which permits us guess the origin of a word *lap or *lappa for which some etymologists suggest the sense of flat stone with the same image of burrow, or hole in the ground, as in pro-Roman cuniculus. This French lapin cannot be linked to the word lepus, which gave lièvre (hare in English), Spanish liebre, Port. lebre, It. lepre. On the other hand, we find in Portuguese, despite the form coelho (rabbit), a laparo (French lapereau), which again could lead to an Iberic origin. The word lapereau does not originate from lapin. We may surmise that the word laparo could have arrived to Portugal via the seaways, linked, who knows, to the trade of pelts. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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