Zompist Bboard Again

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 4:25 pm Can our Nordic-speakers confirm that pride in their respective languages refers specifically to LGBTQ pride?

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Thu Feb 18, 2021 12:47 pm

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Wed Feb 10, 2021 9:52 amHell, even for words coming from Latin, their etymologies are largely useless. Don't you love, too, all those words that just say "De orig. inc.", when Coromines & Pascual may even simply entertain two etyma from Latin?

Anoher Spanish etymologist was Vicente García de Diego (1878-1978), whose work is less known than Coromines', although it inspired some of the DRAE etymologies, as he was a member of the RAE. For example, he was right in deriving Spanish colcha 'quilt' from Latin culcita 'matress, cushion', although not as a native word but a loanword from a Mozarabic dialect (e.g. corcho 'cork' from a masculine variant of Latin cortice(m) 'bark'). From this source it also comes Old French colte (modern coutil) 'feather bed', coilte 'printed duvet', in turn borrowed into English quilt.

However, Coromines thought the source was Old French colche (modern couche) 'bed; layer', a deverbal noun from colchier (modern coucher) 'to lay', ultimately from Latin collocāre 'to set'. Pretty bad.

David Pharies wrote:García de Diego had a long and distinguished career as a linguist, publishing works in such fields as dialectology, Spanish and Latin grammar, Spanish literature, and etymology. He was elected to the Real Academia in 1926, and was a member until his death in 1978.

[...]

Despite the experience and status of García de Diego and the advantageous structure of the DEEH, the work has not enjoyed a great amount of success. A search of the Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico in Google Scholar, for example, returns 297 hits, while a search of “Diccionario crítico etimológico,” which captures both editions of Corominas’ work, returns 4080 hits. The relative obscurity of the DEEH is undoubtedly due in part to the existence of Corominas’ immeasurably more voluminous and more philologically complete dictionary, but there is a more compelling explanation. The DEEH frequently champions etymological equations that can only be described as bizarre, as illustrated by items in our test sequence, cf. bellaco (attributed to Lat. viˉlis ‘contemptible’), chanada ‘trick, fraud’ (< Lat. insānus ‘demented’), chatarra ‘scrap metal’ (< Lat. jactus ‘thrown’), chivo ‘kid’ (< Lat. obsipāre, defined as ‘to separate livestock’), entresijo ‘fatty layer on the front of the abdomen’ (< Lat. *introssiculus < introrsus ‘inwards’), and escamocho ‘meat scraps’ (< Lat. caput mutilāre, defined as ‘to prune’). Clearly, García de Diego’s etymological style mirrors that of Harri Meier (a style called “aberrant” by Malkiel in a 1986 essay in this journal), in that he feels a compunction to find Latin etyma for words that are more likely to be borrowings (chatarra and bellaco are of probable Basque origin) or products of word formation (entresijo is probably a Latin derivative comprising the prefix trans- ‘between’ and the noun ilia ‘side of the body’, cf. Sp. trasijar ‘to gird one’s abdomen’). My impression of the DEEH, in over thirty years of looking up Spanish etymologies, is that it almost always disappoints.

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Wed Dec 14, 2022 9:43 pm I came across the following comment on García de Diego's dictionary.

David Pharies wrote:García de Diego had a long and distinguished career as a linguist, publishing works in such fields as dialectology, Spanish and Latin grammar, Spanish literature, and etymology. He was elected to the Real Academia in 1926, and was a member until his death in 1978.

[...]

Despite the experience and status of García de Diego and the advantageous structure of the DEEH, the work has not enjoyed a great amount of success. A search of the Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico in Google Scholar, for example, returns 297 hits, while a search of “Diccionario crítico etimológico,” which captures both editions of Corominas’ work, returns 4080 hits. The relative obscurity of the DEEH is undoubtedly due in part to the existence of Corominas’ immeasurably more voluminous and more philologically complete dictionary, but there is a more compelling explanation. The DEEH frequently champions etymological equations that can only be described as bizarre, as illustrated by items in our test sequence, cf. bellaco (attributed to Lat. viˉlis ‘contemptible’), chanada ‘trick, fraud’ (< Lat. insānus ‘demented’), chatarra ‘scrap metal’ (< Lat. jactus ‘thrown’), chivo ‘kid’ (< Lat. obsipāre, defined as ‘to separate livestock’), entresijo ‘fatty layer on the front of the abdomen’ (< Lat. *introssiculus < introrsus ‘inwards’), and escamocho ‘meat scraps’ (< Lat. caput mutilāre, defined as ‘to prune’). Clearly, García de Diego’s etymological style mirrors that of Harri Meier (a style called “aberrant” by Malkiel in a 1986 essay in this journal), in that he feels a compunction to find Latin etyma for words that are more likely to be borrowings (chatarra and bellaco are of probable Basque origin) or products of word formation (entresijo is probably a Latin derivative comprising the prefix trans- ‘between’ and the noun ilia ‘side of the body’, cf. Sp. trasijar ‘to gird one’s abdomen’). My impression of the DEEH, in over thirty years of looking up Spanish etymologies, is that it almost always disappoints.

Source: Pharies, David. 2014. "Is There a Need for a New Etymological Dictionary of Spanish?". Romance Philology, vol. 68 (Fall 2014), pp. 369–84. DOI 10.1484/J.RPH.5.107642

Perhaps the relative obscurity of García de Diego's dictionary is kind of deserved.