Latin quaerĕre
Introduction
Another Latin verb that translates as ‘to ask’ is quaerĕre, with the root quaer‑ and principal parts quaerō, quaerĕre, quaesīvī, quaesītum. The infinitive was originally quaesĕre, a third conjugation verb whose source in Proto-Indo-European is not clear. (The sound change ‑s‑ to ‑r‑ between vowels is common in early Latin.) Notice that because it is a third conjugation verb, we expect the past participle to have an irregular stem, in this case quaesīt‑.
This verb quaerĕre
became the ubiquitous Spanish verb querer,
which means primarily ‘to want’, but in the right context it is the most common
verb to express the meaning ‘to love’. From ‘want’ to ‘love’ presumably there is
but one small step (cf. Part I, §6.5.2.6).[i]
Actually, this was a polysemous verb already in Latin, with three major different
senses, the connection between them not being too hard to see. The senses of quaerĕre were the following:
1)
to seek, strive for
2)
to ask, question, inquire
3)
to desire, require, miss/lack
English has a few words that come from the root of to
Latin quaerĕre, in particular from the
passive participle’s stem quaesīt‑
or, rather, its simplified form quaest‑.
The most obvious one is the word question /ˈkwɛs.ʧən/, of course, which
is both a noun and a verb (an archaic spelling of this word was quæstion). This word, which originally
was a noun, is an early 13th century loanword from Old French noun question, which comes from Latin quaestiōnem (accusative
form of the noun quaestiō: quaest‑+‑iōn‑;
from an earlier quaesītiōnem).
The Latin noun quaestiōnem
originally meant ‘an act of seeking’ but it also had some related meanings, such
as ‘inquiry’, ‘question’, and ‘investigation’. The stem of this Latin noun was
a somewhat changed form from the stem quaesīt‑
of the passive/past participle quaesītus
(quaes‑+īt‑), of the
verb quaerĕre. The word question replaced the native English word
frain, fraign, with the same meaning, which came from Old English fræġn.
From the noun question,
English developed the verb to question
in the late 15th century. However, it is also possible that this coinage was
influenced by the existing French verb questionner,
which meant ‘to ask questions’, ‘to interrogate’ and, also, ‘to torture’. The
noun questioner ‘someone who is
asking a question’ was created, in English, from the verb to question by means of the agentive suffix ‑er. This noun can be translated into Spanish as interrogador or interpelante, though Spanish prefers to avoid this noun, preferring
to use verbal expression, such as el que
pregunta ‘the one who asks (a question)’.
Spanish has the cognate noun cuestión, but the primary
meaning is somewhat different from the one question
has in English, which is why it is considered a false friend. Spanish cuestión is a synonym of asunto and it has the meaning of ‘topic/matter
to consider, think, and (perhaps) ask questions about’. English question can sometimes have this sense too
as in, e.g., the question of Palestine, but in English the main sense
has to do with requests for information. The major sense of the word question in English (‘request for information’)
is covered in Spanish by the noun pregunta
and the verb preguntar (see Section §24.4
below).
Just like English has a verb to question, a zero-derived
verb from the noun question, Spanish also
has a derived verb cuestionar. This is
also somewhat of a false friend, however, for the main sense of this verb is one
that is a secondary sense for English to
question, namely to ‘express doubt about’
something (COED), as in the popular 1970’s phrase Question Authority. The dictionary
defines the meaning of cuestionar as ‘poner
en duda lo que parece aceptarse’ (to cast doubt on something that is commonly taken
to be true) (VOX). Spanish probably prefers the expression poner en duda to cuestionar
as the translation of this sense of Eng. question.
Another English word that ultimately goes back to the verb quaerĕre is quest (c. 1300). It comes
from Old French queste ‘acquisition, search,
hunt’, which ultimately comes from Latin quaesta
‘inquiry, search, etc.’, the feminine form of quaestus above. It was a noun derived from the shortened form of quaesīta, the feminine past participle
of quaerĕre. The core meaning of this
word is the one we saw in sense (1) above, namely ‘to seek, strive for’.
English inquest /ˈɪn.kwəst/
is obviously a prefixed form of quest,
as we will see when we look at English and Spanish reflexes of prefixed forms of
quaerĕre below. It was borrowed from Old
French enqueste in the 13th century (Modern
French enquête /ɑ̃.ˈkɛt/). It is mostly a legal
term that means ‘a judicial inquiry to ascertain the facts relating to an
incident’ (COED) (in Britain it has a couple of additional, related specialized
meanings).
English quest translates
into Spanish as búsqueda or busca, nouns derived from the verb buscar ‘to look for, search’. Inquest in Spanish is investigación judicial, but also sometimes encuesta
judicial. Spanish encuesta
is a historical cognate of Eng. inquest,
actually also borrowed from Old French (cf. Mod.Fr. enquête). Spanish encuesta
is hardly ever used with the meaning it has in English, however, thus making it
a pretty false friend. The main meaning of the word encuesta nowadays is ‘poll, survey’. The same thing is true of the derived
verb encuestar
‘to poll, survey’.
Lat. inquīrĕre
The false friends Eng. inquest
and Sp. encuesta go back ultimately to
a prefixed form of the verb from Lat. quaerĕre
with the prefix in‑. From this same Latin
verb with the same prefix we get the Latin inquīrĕre
which is the source of the English verb to
inquire /ɪn.ˈkwaɪ̯.əɹ/ (spelled enquire
in British English), which means ‘to ask for information’ and ‘to investigate’ (COED).
English got this verb from Anglo-French enquerre
in the 13th century, which ultimately comes from Latin inquīrĕre, which has the root inquīr‑ and the principal parts inquīrō,
inquīrĕre, inquīsīvī, inquīsītum. This verb is derived from in‑ ‘in, at, on; into’ + quaerĕre
‘seek, look for’ (the vowel change from ae
> ī in the root is something that happened in early Latin,
cf. Part I, Chapter 8,
§8.3.3).
Spanish has the cognate verb inquirir, but this verb is
a fancy cultismo (learned word), even
more so than English inquire. The best
translation of English inquire in Spanish
is, no doubt, preguntar.
English also has the derived, and rather formal, noun inquiry,
spelled enquiry in British English, and
pronounced either /ˈɪn.kwə.ɹi/ or /ɪn.ˈkwaɪ̯.ɹi/ (only the latter in British
English). An inquiry is a systematic search
for information (answers) or an examination. There isn’t a Spanish cognate for this
English noun. The best translations for inquiry
in Spanish for the two senses mentioned are pregunta
and investigación, and the English expression
to make an inquiry would translate into Spanish as preguntar.
You may have noticed that the fourth principal form of the verb
inquīrĕre is inquīsītum, and you may have recognized it
as the source of the words Eng. inquisition ~ Sp. inquisición.
Indeed, these words go back to Latin noun inquīsītiōnem
(accusative of inquīsītiō), a noun derived
from the passive participle stem inquīsīt‑
of this verb and the noun-forming derivational ending ‑iōn‑. It originally meant ‘act or process of inquiring’,
but it came to have a much more limited meaning when it came to be used for ‘an
ecclesiastical tribunal established c. 1232 [by the Christian Roman Catholic Church]
for the suppression of heresy, notorious for its use of torture’ (COED).[ii]
Lat. adquīrĕre
Another pair of Spanish-English cognates that are related to
Latin quaerĕre are Eng. acquire
~ Sp. adquirir. English acquire
/ə.ˈkwaɪ̯.əɹ/
came from Old French aquerre in the 15th
century. This French verb seems to be a patrimonial verb derived from Vulgar
Latin *acquaerere, which comes ultimately
from Lat. adquīrĕre ‘to acquire,
get, obtain’, which was formed with the prefix ad ‘to’ + quaerĕre. The meanings
of the two cognate verbs in English and Spanish are as close as they get. It is
interesting, however, that English acquire
comes from a French patrimonial word, whereas Spanish adquirir would seem to be a learned word, first attested in the
early 15th century. On the other hand, adquirir
is not a fully regular verb, as one expects a learned loanword to be. Thus, we
find that the stem ‑i‑ vowel changes
to ‑ie‑ whenever the stem ‑e‑ vowel of the verb querer does, e.g. adquiero ‘I acquire’. We may assume that his has to do with interference
from the conjugation of the patrimonial verb querer, which is a stem-changing verb. (Note that the preterit of adquirir is regular, whereas the
preterit of querer is not, e.g. adquirí ‘I acquired’, not *adquise.)
In addition to the cognate verbs acquire-adquirir, we have
the derived cognate nouns Eng. acquisition
~ Sp. adquisición, also with equivalent
meanings. They are all semi-fancy words, not typically used in colloquial speech,
but quite common. Even a collocation such as an acquired taste, as in Martinis are an acquired
taste, translates into Spanish as un gusto
adquirido (actually, this is very likely
a calque, cf. Part I, Chapter 4,
§4.8).
However, the two sets of words are not always equivalent, especially in collocations.
Thus, the English collocation acquire
a bad
name is rendered into Spanish as recibir mala prensa, and acquire a taste for something
is perhaps best translated as cogerle
gusto a algo or tomarle gusto a algo. As we have said before, there are no
perfect cognates, just like there are no perfect synonyms. On the other hand, there
are usually no perfect false friends (totally imperfect cognates) either.
Lat. requīrĕre
Another verb derived from quaerĕre in Latin was requīrĕre,
with the stem requīr‑ and the
principal parts requīrō, requīrere, requīsīvī, requīsītum.
This verb was formed with the prefix re‑
‘repeatedly’ and it was polysemous since it meant ‘to ask for’, but also ‘need’,
‘desire’, and even ‘miss’. From this verb, come the cognates Eng. require
~ Sp. requerir.
English require is
a 14th century loanword from patrimonial French requerre ‘to beg, ask’ or perhaps from the remodeled version of this
word in French, namely requérir /ʀə.ke.ˈʀiʀ/. English require /ɹɪ.ə.ˈkwaɪ̯.əɹ/ originally meant something like the original Latin verb
did, namely ‘to ask, inquire’.
The Spanish version requerir
was probably also borrowed through French requérir.
Both Eng. require and Sp. requerir share their two major meanings:
‘need, depend on’ and ‘demand, compel’. Spanish requerir is not always the best translation for English require, however, though it often is. Sometimes
exigir or necesitar, synonyms of requerir,
are better equivalent verbs. The idiomatic expression to be required to do something is best translated as estar obligado a hacer algo, in part because require
is never used in the passive voice in Spanish.
There are a few cognate or semi-cognate words derived from this
verb in both English and Spanish. One is the noun Eng. requirement ‘something that is required, a necessity; something obligatory,
a prerequisite’, a 17th century creation from the verb require with the suffix ‑ment
(in other words, it was not a Latin word). There is a Spanish cognate of this word,
namely requerimiento, which is quite fancy
and probably a loanword from English. Spanish prefers to use the noun requisito for this meaning, a cognate of
Eng. requisite, which is rare in English,
more rare than its derived synonym prerequisite.
Both requisite and Sp. requisito are learned words borrowed from
Lat. requīsītum ‘needed thing, asked for
thing’, a neuter, nominalized form of the passive participle of requīrĕre, namely requīsītus. Both requirement
and prerequisite are used in academia
to refer to courses that one must take before taking a particular course. The preferred
option in Spanish in this case is requisito
(not the rare requerimiento or the non-existent
*prerrequisito).
The English verb and noun request /ɹɪ.ˈkwɛst/
is etymologically related to the verb require.
In this case, the noun came first and the verb was derived from the noun, in English.
The noun request came in the 14th century,
from French requeste, with the same meaning,
from Vulgar Latin requīsīta, feminine
passive participle of requīrĕre
and meaning ‘thing requested’. The derived verb is first attested in the 16th century.
There is no Spanish cognate for Eng. request.
The verb request translates into Spanish
as pedir or solicitar, but also rogar
in some formal, legal situations. The noun request
translates as petición or solicitud, nouns derived from the Spanish
verbs we just mentioned.
There are other words that are related to this root that are
worth mentioning. The first one comes from military vocabulary: Sp. requisar
‘to commandeer, to requisition’. The English semi-cognate noun (and derived verb)
requisition,
is a 15th century borrowing from French réquisition.
It goes back to the Medieval Latin noun requisitionem,
a noun derived from the stem requīsīt‑
of the passive participle (requīsītus)
of the verb requīrĕre. In Spanish, the
noun requisición
is quite rare. Less rare perhaps is its synonym requisa, which seems to
be a back-formation from the verb requisar
or a 19th century adaptation of French réquisition.
Lat. exquīrĕre
Another derived verb from quaerĕre was exquīrĕre, which was formed with the prefix ex‑ ‘out of’ and which meant ‘to seek out,
search for; inquire into’ (principal parts: exquīrō,
exquīrere, exquīsīvī, exquīsītum). This
verb has not survived in English or Spanish, but both languages have borrowed the
adjective that comes from the passive participle of this verb by conversion, namely
exquīsītus. The cognates that come
from this word are the adjectives Eng. exquisite and Sp. exquisito.
Eng. exquisite /ɪk.ˈskwɪ.zət/ is a 15th century borrowing
from Latin. Spanish borrowed the word from Latin around the same time. French borrowed
this word too, in the late 14th century, and it is very likely that English and
Spanish borrowed it through French, a situation that we have seen over and over.
French eventually shortened the word to exquis,
fem. exquise.
Eng. exquisite and
Sp. exquisito are not exactly the
best of friends for their meaning is not exactly the same. Sp. exquisito has the original sense, which it
shares with English, namely ‘refined, select, delicate’. Additionally, a new sense
has been developed for Sp. exquisito from
the former meaning in the context of food, which is why this noun translates
into English as ‘delicious, delectable, luscious’. Spanish has a derived noun from
this adjective, namely exquisitez, which is equivalent to (and
paronimous with) English exquisiteness (a noun derived in
English from exquisite by adding the
Germanic suffix ‑ness) in the first, general
sense just mentioned. However, Sp. exquisitez
is best translated as delicacy in the
context of food.
Lat. conquīrĕre
Finally, the Latin verb quaerĕre
was joined to the prefix con‑ ‘with’ to
derive the verb conquīrĕre
‘to seek out, hunt, collect, procure by effort’ (principal parts: conquīrō, conquīrere, conquīsīvī, conquīsītus). This verb developed into the
now obsolete, patrimonial Old Spanish verb conquerir
as well as its Old French cognate conquerre,
both meaning ‘to conquer, defeat, vanquish’, a meaning that must have been present
already in Late Latin.
From Old French conquerre
English got its verb to conquer /ˈkɒn.kəɹ/ in the 12th century (the
modern French equivalent is conquérir).
Spanish conquerir, however, stopped being
used by the 16th century and was replaced by conquistar, a verb derived
(in Spanish) from the noun derived from conquerir,
namely conquista, a cognate of Eng. conquest /ˈkɒn.kwəst/,
which is a borrowing from Old French conqueste
(Modern French conquête).
The nouns conquest
and conquista started off as adjectives
in Latin. That is, they were adjectives derived from the feminine form of the passive
participle of Lat. conquīrĕre,
namely conquīsīta. From the verbs conquer and conquistar, agentive nouns have been developed, namely Eng. conqueror
and Sp. conquistador, by means of the typical agentive suffixes, Eng. ‑or and Sp. ‑dor.
[GO TO PART 3]
[GO TO PART 3]
[i] The first R was originally
an S in Latin, but Latin S between vowels often became rhotasized and changed
to R.
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