This is Part 1
Although they do not look much alike, the Spanish verb sentar and the English verb sit are indeed cognate, if not exactly cognates, since they both can be traced back to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *sed- ‘to sit, be seated’. In this chapter we will tell the story of words that have come into English and Spanish from this root, which as we will see had three variants in the original Proto-Indo-European language, and the many cognates in these languages that are derived from it. Cognates typically came through Latin, not as in the case of sentar and sit, which are patrimonial words in their respective languages.
The intransitive English verb sit [ˈsɪt] is a common Germanic one, with cognates in all other
Germanic languages, such as Dutch zitten,
German sitzen, and Swedish sitta. In Middle English, it was sitten and in Old English sittan. The Proto-Germanic word that these
Garmanic verbs come from has been constructed as *sitjaną. It has cognates in other Indo-European languages, such as
Irish suigh, Sanskrit सीदति (sīdati), and Russian
сиде́ть (sidétʹ).
In Modern English, the verb sit is typically a stative one, equivalent to to be sitting (down). For the action of sitting, the phrasal verb sit down is typically used, although in
some situations the adverbial down is
not needed. For instance, in the command forms Sit!, which does indeed refer to the act of sitting down, the
adverbial down can sometimes be
omitted, such as when giving commands to dogs. (For more on English phrasal verbs,
see Part I, Chapter 4,
§4.12.3.)
Verb (complex)
|
Semantics
|
Spanish equivalent
|
sit
|
stative
|
estar sentado/a
|
sit (down)
|
active
|
sentarse
|
sit up[1]
|
active antonym
|
levantarse, incorporarse;
enderezarse
|
be sitting
|
stative
|
estar sentado/a
|
be seated
|
stative
|
estar sentado/a
|
The verb sit
is what’s called a strong verb whose past tense and past participle are both sat [ˈsæt].
(In Old English, the past tense of this verb is attested as set and sette, among others, and the past participle as geseten and seten, among others.)
English also has a transitive verb to seat, whose main
meaning today is ‘to place on a seat or seats; to cause to sit down’ (OED).
This verb developed in the 16th century out of the noun seat, whose primary meaning is ‘a thing made or used for sitting
on, such as a chair or stool’ (COED), though it has a few other secondary
senses (see below). The noun seat is
a loanword from around the year 1200 from Old Norse sæti ‘seat, position’, from Proto-Germanic *sētiją. The verb seat that
was derived from the noun seat at
first meant ‘to be in a certain position’, but already in the early 1600’s it had
acquired its modern transitive and causative meaning ‘to cause to be seated’. The
past participle of the verb seat is seated, which has been converted into an
adjective too, which is how this word is mostly used. It is equivalent to Sp. sentado/a, the past participle of Sp. sentar (see below), as in She was seated to his right (Sp. Estaba sentada a su izquierda).
The noun seat
translates in different ways into Spanish since seat is a polysemous word, with
senses such as ‘place to sit’ (Sp. asiento),
‘part of a chair’ (Sp. asiento as
well), ‘part of trousers’ (Sp. parte del
trasero, etc.), etc. The most common equivalent of the noun seat in Spanish is asiento, which translates its main meaning, a word that will be
explored below. Other words may be used to translate the noun seat, however. A numbered seat in a
stadium may be called localidad and
in a theater butaca. In a legislature,
a seat is known as escaño, and in a
committee, it is a puesto or lugar, and on a bus or airplane it may
translate as plaza. Also, a bicycle
seat is a sillín in Spanish. When a
seat refers to a headquarters, central office or venue, Spanish may use the
word sede, which we will return to
later as well, since it is derived from the same root (more on Sp. sede below).
Additionally, this word is found in many idiomatic
expressions, such as to take a seat (Sp.
tomar asiento), to take a back seat (Sp. tomar
un papel secundario, mantenerse al
margen) and in the driver’s seat (Sp.
al control, llevar las riendas), and collocations, such as window seat (Sp. asiento de
la ventana) and reserve a seat
(Sp. reservar una plaza, etc.).
The noun seat that
was borrowed from Old Norse was a cognate of Old English noun set, derived from the also patrimonial
verb to set, and meaning ‘the act of
setting’, as in sunset, but it could
also mean ‘seat’, ‘a place where people remain’, etc. The verb set comes from Old English settan which meant ‘to cause to sit, put
in some place’ among other things, much like Modern English set does. The verbs seat and set derive from
transitive (causative) Proto-Germanic *(bi)satjan
‘to cause to sit, set’, which comes from a Proto-Indo-European root *sod‑, which was a variant of the root *sed‑ that we have already seen.[2]
Proto-Indo-European roots had variants in which the
vowel could change to modify the meaning of the root. (For more on
Proto-Indo-European, see Part I, Chapter 3;
for more on what a root is, see Part I, Chapter 5.)
This system is known as ablaut (cf. Part I, Chapter 8,
§8.3.3).
The English wordforms sing sang sung
song are a remnant of a type of
ablaut in English, a Germanic language. Proto-Indo-European roots could have
different ablaut grades, depending on what the root’s vowel was, such as the
following:
zero
|
short
|
long
|
∅
|
e
|
ē
|
o
|
ō
|
Investigators have been able to reconstruct some
aspects of the Proto-Indo-European ablaut system. According to these
reconstructions, we know that this PIE root had four different forms, each one
of them has been found to have had different optional suffixes attached to
them: (1) basic form sed‑; (2) an
o-grade variant sod‑; (3) a
zero-grade variant sd‑; and (4) a
lengthened-grade form *sēd.
From these different variants come a number of words in English and Spanish,
from Eng. sit, nest, and soot, to Sp. sentar, asiento, and silla. In
this chapter we will look at all of these words.
Finally, before moving on to look ‘verbs of sitting’ in English
and Spanish, we should mention one other native word that contains this root and
which has a similar meaning, namely the verb settle. This verb, which was setlen
in Middle English, comes from Old English setlan
meaning ‘to settle, seat, put to rest’, which is only attested once and which was
derived from the Old English noun setl
‘seat, place of rest’, and thus we can see it was once a verb of sitting.[1]
The noun setl is derived from the Proto-Indo-European
stem *sedla‑, which contains the root
*sed‑ ‘to sit’, from which also come Latin
sella ‘seat, chair’, source of Sp. silla ‘chair’ (see below), and Old
English sadol ‘saddle’, source of Mod.
Eng. saddle.
The Old English verb setlan
meant ‘to seat; to put in a seat or place of rest; also, to cause to sit down’ (OED),
a meaning that is now obsolete. The OED gives 35 senses for this word, some containing
subsenses, most of which are not obsolete.[2]
However, the main meanings of these verb today are transitive ‘to put into
order; arrange or fix definitely as desired’ and intransitive ‘to discontinue
moving and come to rest in one place’ (AHD).
[1] Note that it seems that ‘in some uses, the verb [settle] became synonymous with the like-sounding Middle English saȝtle ‘to appease, reconcile’ (saughtel v.), association with which may
perhaps have influenced the development of these uses’ (OED).
[2] Regarfding those 35 senses, the OED tells us that “In many of the senses
explained below, the verb frequently appears with a colouring derived from
senses of different origin, so that the position of many of the examples is
open to dispute”.
[1] In some dialects of English, sit up can also have the meaning
‘refrain from going to bed until later than usual’ (COED). This would translate
into Spanish as quedarse levantado
or, if one sits up waiting for someone, esperar
levantado. English also has a noun derived from the phrasal verb sit up, namely situp or sit-up, that
means ‘a physical exercise designed to strengthen the abdominal muscles, in
which a person sits up from a supine position without using the arms for
leverage’ (COED). The noun dates from the mid-1950s in English. The Spanish
equivalent is (ejercicio) abdominal
(thus, to do situps translates as hacer abdominales in Spanish).
[2] The noun set
meaning ‘collection of things’, equivalent to Sp. conjunto, is according to some an unrelated homonym. It is a
mid-15th century loan from Old French sette
‘sequence’, a variant of secte
‘religious community’," from Medieval Latin secta ‘retinue’, from Latin secta
‘a faction’ or ‘a following’. According to others, English just borrowed this
new sense, a semantic calque, for the existing English word set.
[i] Source: Buddha sitting in
bhumisparsha-mudra posture (calling the earth to be his witness). Burma. White
marble with traces of polychromy. Photograph by Rama. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buddha_sitting-MGR_Lyon-IMG_9878.jpg#/media/File:Buddha_sitting-MGR_Lyon-IMG_9878.jpg
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