Lat. revert- and revers-
The next pair of cognates that come from a verb derived from
Lat. vĕrtĕre
is Eng. revert and Sp. revertir and reverter, which are not exactly
useful cognates, that is, ‘good friends’. Latin had two equivalent (synonymous)
and related verbs from which these verbs arose, both of which meant ‘to return,
turn back, turn around’. One was the third conjugation revĕrtĕre, derived from the
basic verb vĕrtĕre
with the prefix re‑ ‘back; again’.
Its principal parts were present revĕrtō,
present infinitive revĕrtĕre,
perfect revĕrtī, and
passive participle revĕrsus.
The other was a third conjugation deponent version of this verb, revĕrtī, whose principal
parts were present revĕrtor,
present infinitive revĕrtī,
and perfect active revĕrsus
sum (for deponent verbs, see Part I, Chapter 8,
§8.4.3.2).
English intransitive revert
[ɹɪ.ˈvɜɹt], which is always followed by the preposition to, means primarily ‘to return to a
former condition, practice, subject, or belief’ (AHD), as in past’, as in Things reverted to normal (= Things went back to normal). This sense
translates into Spanish with volver
or regresar, both of which mean ‘to
go back’, e.g. Sp. Las cosas
volvieron/regresaron a la normalidad. In legal terminology, when speaking
of money or property, Eng. revert also
means ‘to return to the former owner or to the former owner’s heirs’ (AHD), as
in After he died, the estate reverted to
his brother (= The estate went back
to his brother). This sense of revert
can be translated into Spanish with the cognate verb revertir (conjugated like sentir),
cf. Cuando murió, el patrimonio revirtió
a su hermano. In other words, Eng. revert and Sp. revertir are only partial
friends.
Eng. revert is a 13th
century borrowing from Old French revertir,
which seems to have come from a Vulgar Latin *revertire, a compromise variant of the two Latin verbs we just
mentioned. French does not have this verb anymore and the way Eng. revert is translated by other verbs such
as retourner, revenir, or reprendre,
depending on the context.
Spanish revertir probably
came from the same Vulgar Latin variant *revertire
of Latin revĕrtĕre
(the DLE and other dictionaries say that it comes from the Latin revĕrtī). As we saw, it shares
with Eng. revert the legal sense just
mentioned, but as to the other sense, namely ‘to go back to a previous state or
condition’, matters are not so clear. Some dictionaries, such as the Academy’s
DLE, claim that Sp. revertir also has
that sense.[1]
But bilingual dictionaries agree that that that sense of Eng. revert is best translated as volver or even regresar.
Spanish revertir has
another sense that English revert does
not have, namely ‘to have an impact for someone’, typically having to do with monetary
benefits or charges. This last sense or revertir
is rather fancy and rare, however. It is typically followed by the preposition en and is synonymous with repercutir, e.g. Estas inversiones revertirán en beneficio nuestro ‘These investments will have a positive
impact on our benefits’.
As we have seen, the passive participle of Lat. revĕrtĕre was revĕrsus, which most
basically meant ‘returned’. Both this word and other Latin words derived from the
stem revĕrs‑ have
made it into English and Spanish. In English, we find reverse, which can be a verb,
an adjective, or a noun. The adjective and the noun come ultimately from the Latin
passive participle reversus. The adjective
reverse came first, around 1300, from
Old French revers ‘reverse, cross, opposite’,
which itself was borrowed from Latin reversus
a bit earlier in the 13th century. Its main meaning is ‘going in or turned
towards the opposite direction’ (COED), e.g. reverse gear (Sp. marcha
atrás). The main Spanish equivalent of this adjective is contrario
and inverso, e.g. Eng. reverse order and Sp. orden inverso.
The noun reverse, meaning
‘opposite, contrary’, came in the mid-14th century, probably derived from the Old
French noun revers, with the same meaning,
which eventually goes back to the same Latin passive participle. Actually, this
noun has different senses. One of them is ‘a complete change of direction or
action’ (COED). Another sense of this noun is an ellipsis of the phrase reverse gear, as in I put it into reverse (gear), cf. Sp. Lo puse (en) marcha atrás, or of the phrase reverse order, as in in
reverse, cf. Sp. a la inversa, al revés. Yet another sense of this noun
is ‘a change in fortune from better to worse; a setback’ (AHD), as in the
sentence She suffered financial reverses,
cf. Sp. revés.
The verb reverse, on
the other hand, came in the early 14th century from Old French reverser ‘to reverse, turn around; roll,
turn up’, which itself had borrowed it in the 12th century from Late Latin revĕrsāre ‘to turn
about, turn back’, a frequentative version of Latin revĕrtĕre (frequentative Latin verbs
were derived from the passive participle stem, cf. Part I, Chapter 8,
§8.38.4.3.6).
At first it was only a transitive verb meaning ‘to change, etc.’, but in the 15th
century it came to also have an intransitive sense, something like ‘to go backwards’.
Today it is most a transitive verb, one of whose meanings is ‘to change
something, such as a decision, judgment, or process so that it is the opposite
of what it was before’, as in The judge
reversed the decision (DOCE). Another transitive sense is ‘to change around
the usual order of the parts of something, or the usual things two people do’,
as in the collocations reverse roles
and reverse positions (DOCE). In Spanish,
for the sense ‘reverse positions or roles’ we use invertir and for ‘reverse a decision’ we use revocar. In British English, reverse
the car is equivalent to put the car
into reverse in American English. Finally, speaking of causing something to
be the opposite of what it was, as in reverse
climate change, one may use the same words as for moving backwards, such as
dar marcha atrás al cambio climático,
or other verbs such as cancelar.
Derived from Lat. revĕrsus,
Spanish has the noun reverso ‘reverse, back (side)’, as
in el reverso de la moneda/medalla,
lit. ‘the back (side) of the coin/medal’ (figuratively, this can be an
idiomatic phrase that means ‘the exact opposite’). Additionally, Spanish has
the already mentioned patrimonial (masculine) noun revés (pl. reveses), which is
a polysemous word. It can also be used with the figurative sense ‘misfortune,
setback, reverse’, as we mentioned earlier (synonym: contrariedad). The noun revés
can also mean a slap with the back of the hand and, in tennis, a ‘backhand
(stroke)’. This noun is also used to refer to the ‘back’ (not-front) side of
things such as a cloth or document or the inside of an article of clothing, as in
el revés de la camisa ‘the shirt’s in
side’. This sense is found in the very common adverbial phrase al revés ‘the other/opposite/wrong way,
backwards’, as in Se puso la camisa al
revés ‘He put the shirt on backwards’, a meaning that can also be expressed
with the variant del revés. The
phrase al revés can also be used
figuratively and then it means something like ‘the opposite’ or ‘the wrong
way’, as in Es al revés de lo que dijiste
‘It’s the opposite of what you said’ or Me
sale todo al revés ‘Everthing I do comes out wrong’.
From the passive participle stem revĕrs‑ of the verb revĕrtĕre,
Latin formed a frequentative verb revĕrsāre
in Late Latin which came to mean ‘to turn around’. In Spanish, this verb became
revesar
which is still used in some places with the meaning ‘to throw up, vomit’
(synonym: vomitar). Spanish also has
a verb enrevesar, often used in the intransitive reflexive form, which
is derived from the noun revés (en‑reves‑ar).
It means ‘to complicate (a situation), stir up trouble, etc.’ Curiously, this
verb is not found in the major dictionaries of Spanish. Its synonyms include complicar, enredar, and the colloquial embarullar
and liar (Clave). What we do find in
all dictionaries is the adjective enrevesado/a, which means ‘complicated,
difficult, convoluted, etc.’. This
adjective would seem to be derived from the past participle of enrevesar but actually enrevesar may be a back formation of enrevesado, which would have been
derived from the noun revés.
Finally, the Spanish verb rebosar ‘to overflow, brim over, etc.’ is a patrimonial verb that also
descends from Late Latin revĕrsāre.
It would seem that because of the unusual vowel change from e to o,
the Academy did not realize at first what the origin of this verb was and allowed
the verb to keep a non-etymological 〈b〉 in its spelling. The verb rebosar can be used literally, as in the
sentence El embalse está a punto de rebosar
‘The dam is about to overflow’. Perhaps more often, however, it is used figuratively,
as in El estadio rebosaba de gente ‘The
stadium was full to bursting’ (OSD) and Juan
rebosaba (de) alegría ‘Juan was brimming with joy’. This verb is most commonly
accompanied by the nouns alegría ‘joy’,
felicidad ‘happiness’, entusiasmo ‘enthusiasm’, optimismo ‘optimism’, and salud ‘health’. The English verb overfill would translate into Spanish with
the phrase llenar hasta rebosar. Finally,
we should mention that this verb should not be confused with the verb rebozar ‘to coat in egg, breacrumbs or
batter’, which is homophonous with rebosar
for most speakers of Spanish.
Lat. invert- and invers-
The remaining pairs of cognates are even less ‘friendly’ than
the preceding ones, since their meanings diverge even more. The first one is Eng.
invert
and Sp. invertir, which come from Latin invĕrtĕre, whose literal meaning was ‘to turn upside down’,
though it could have other derived figurative senses, such as ‘to pervert’ and ‘to
change’. Both English and Spanish seem to have borrowed this verb directly from
Latin in the 16th century.
The main meaning of English invert is ‘put upside down or in the opposite position, order, or arrangement’
(COED), just as in its Latin source invĕrtĕre.
Spanish invertir, can also be used with
the meaning ‘to turn upside down’ or ‘reverse order’, but perhaps the most common
sense of this word in modern Spanish is ‘to invest’ (either time, money, or other
resources), a very different meaning. Perhaps because of this, Spanish does not
use invertir much for the ‘reverse’ sense,
other than as a technical term, preferring to use phrases such as dar la
vuelta. A person who invests money is
known as inversor in Spanish, an investor.
Both Spanish and English have derived adjectives out of the respective
regular past participles of these verbs, namely Eng. inverted and Sp. invertido.
Spanish invertido, again, could have both
meanings: ‘inverted’ (‘inside out, upside down, etc.’) as well as ‘invested’. Additionally,
Spanish has developed a noun invertido
which is used with the meaning of ‘homosexual’. This sense probably stems from the
sense ‘to pervert’ of Latin invĕrtĕre
mentioned earlier.
The past participle of Latin invĕrtĕre was invĕrsus
(in+vĕrs+us), which
has given us the cognate adjectives Eng. inverse
and Sp. inverso/a. English inverse means primarily ‘opposite’ and it
typically translates into Spanish as inverso,
though as we saw earlier, used as a noun, inverso
can also translate the English adjective reverse.
Spanish uses the adjective inverso/a in
a couple of expressions that do not translate with cognates, namely a la
inversa ‘mirror-image, in reverse, the
other way round, vice versa’ and en sentido inverso ‘in the opposite direction’.
As usual, Latin could derive a noun from the passive
participle stem verb invĕrtĕre
by means of the suffix, ‑iōn‑,
to name the action or the result of the action and, as always, this suffix was attached
to the verb’s past participle stem, in this case invĕrs‑. From this noun, we get the cognates Eng. inversion and Sp. inversión. Predictably, English inversion means primarily
‘the action of inverting or the state of being inverted’ (COED) and Spanish inversión
means either that or ‘investment’, which is probably its primary meaning, just as
in the case of the verb.
One wonders how Spanish invertir
and inversión acquired their current ‘investment’
meaning, since it did not have that meaning in Latin. Related to this is the question
of how English invest and investment come to have the ‘financial’ meaning
that Spanish invertir and inversión have. Let us start first with the
latter question. The English verb invest
comes from Latin investīre
(investĭo, investīre, investivi, investitus), from in ‘in’
+ vestire ‘to dress, clothe’ (cf. Sp.
vestir), which meant ‘to clothe (in)’
and, figuratively, ‘to cover, surround’. English invest is a late 14th century loan, presumably from Latin, though
it may have also helped that French had a cognate investir (14th c.), which had been earlier spelled envestir (13th c.). The original meaning
of Eng. invest was ‘to clothe in the
official robes of an office’ (OLED). The sense ‘commit (money or capital) in
order to gain a financial return’ (AHD) of the verb invest first appears in the early 17th century and it seems to have
been semantically calqued from the Italian cognate investire which had developed this sense already in the 14th
century. French investir also has
this financial sense, but it seems to have gotten it from English and not until
the early 20th century. The descendant of this Latin verb in Spanish is the
cognate investir, whose primary meaning
today is a metaphorical one, namely ‘to confer/bestow an important rank or
office’, one synonymous with conferir
and otorgar, as in the sentence Le invistieron
doctor honoris causa ‘they invested
her with the degree of doctor, honoris causa’ (VOX).
English has a noun derived from the verb invest that maintains the original meaning,
namely investiture, from Medievak Lat.
investītūra, formed from the suffix ‑ūr‑
added to the past participle stem (in+vest+īt+ūr-a).
This noun translates into Spanish by its cognate investidura, though the Spanish word is used with the sense of
‘presidential inauguration’ as well. For the financial sense of the verb invest, English derived the noun investment out of the verb invest with the Latinate noun-forming suffix
‑ment in order to name the act or result
of investing. Eng. investment translates into Spanish as inversión (see above). Actually, the noun investment was created in English before the verb acquired the new
meaning and it originally meant ‘the act of putting on vestments’.
Just as curious as this meaning change of the word invest in English, French and Italian is
the development of the ‘invest’ meaning in the Spanish verb invertir, a meaning that seems to have
no connection to the original meaning ‘to turn around’. The expected thing
would have been for Spanish to follow suit with what its neighbors (Italian,
French, English) had done and borrow the financial meaning to the verb investir, a semantic calque. Instead, Spanish
added that sense to the similar-sounding verb invertir. One could come up with theories as to why invertir was given this new sense, such
as that the purpose of investing is to obtain a turnaround or a change for the
better in one’s finances. One suspects, however, that it was more likely a
mistake that the first person who borrowed (calqued) the sense, giving it to
the verb invertir instead of to the
verb investir.
[1] This sense is definied in the DEL as: ‘dicho
de una cosa: Volver al estado o condición que tuvo antes’ (‘said of a thing: to
return to a state or condition it had before’).
No comments:
Post a Comment