Family relations by marriage: in-laws and step relatives
There are a few more common Spanish words for family relations,
all of them in-law relations and all of which come from Latin, though none of them
have English cognates. Actually, one of the four words is very much related to the
theme of this book, namely the word cuñado
‘brother-in-law’, fem. cuñada ‘sister-in-law’.
The reason for this is that cuñado [ku.ˈɲa.ðo] is the patrimonial version
of the learned Spanish word cognado [koɣ.ˈna.ðo],
cognate of the English word cognate [ˈkʰɒɡ.neɪ̯t]. In other words, cuñado and cognado are a cognate doublet (cf. Part I, Chapter 1).
Spanish cuñado comes
from Latin cōgnātus,
which originally meant ‘blood relative’, that is, ‘sprung from the same stock,
related by blood, kindred’ (L&S), as the meaning of its parts indicate: cō‑ (a variant of con‑ before some consonants) ‘together’ +
gnātus (later natus) ‘born’, the passive participle of
the verb gnāscī (later nāscī) ‘to be born’. It seems that the word
may have been used in Late Latin to refer to any type of relative. In Old Spanish,
cuñado/a referred to any non-blood relative, that is a relative by marriage (Sp.
pariente por afinidad or pariente político), but by
the 14th century it seems that the main meaning was the one it has today,
namely ‘brother-in-law’ for cuñado and ‘sister-in-law’ for cuñada.
Nebrija’s 1499 dictionary still gives ‘relative by marriage’ as one of this word’s
meanings, a meaning that is today obsolete (DCEH).
Strictly speaking, the word cuñado/a is used to refer
to the brother or sister of one’s spouse (Sp. hermano/a del cónyuge) or spouse
of one’s brother or sister (Sp. cónyuge del hermano/de la hermana). In practice,
however, the word cuñado/a is also used to refer to other extended relations,
namely, for cuñado, wife’s brother-in-law or sister-in-law’s husband; and
for cuñada, husband’s sister-in-law or brother-in-law. Note, however,
that Spanish has a special word for these latter relationships, one derived from
cuñado/a, namely concuñado/a, which is often shortened to concuño/a
in Spanish America. This word is derived by means of the prefix con‑
‘with’ added to the This term is more commonly used in some dialects of Spanish
than others. Another term for cuñado/a is hermano/a político.
As we said, the word cuñado/a
is patrimonial in Spanish since it descended uninterrupted by oral transmission
from Latin and was not borrowed from that language later on as a learned word (Sp.
cultismo). The form of the word cuñado is quite regularly derived
from the Latin word cognatum/a, since
Lat. gn always became ñ in Old Spanish, t became d between vowels,
and o was often raised to u when next to a palatal consonant, such
as in this case ñ (cf. Part I,
Chapter 10).
The term
in-law in
English is a curious one with an interesting history. The
law that is being referred to here is none other than Canon Law, which
is the ‘the body of officially established rules governing the faith and practice
of the members of a Christian church’ (AHD), as well as the affinity rules that
prohibit marriage among relatives, which at some point included non-blood relatives,
i.e. relatives by marriage. One particular such rule was that someone couldn’t marry
a deceased spouse’s sibling. Thus, for instance, a man could not marry a dead wife’s
sister, since she was a sister “in-law” (that is, a sister according to the Canon
Law). The forms with
in-law in them, such
as
brother-in-law, came about in English
in the 14th century. Some of the terms have changed somewhat since then, since the
terms daughter-in-law and son-in-law, for instance, used to refer to step-children
as well as one’s children’s spouses, as covered in Canon Law.
[1]
Before returning to the other Spanish terms for in-laws, let
us mention the equally interesting history of the terms for other relations by marriage,
such as those than contain the prefix step‑
in English: stepson, stepdaughter, stepfather, stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister. The Spanish equivalents for all of those words have the
suffix ‑astro/‑astra: hijastro ‘stepson’,
hijastra ‘stepdaughter’, padrastro ‘stepfather’, madrastra ‘stepmother’, hermanastro ‘stepbrother’, and hermanastra ‘stepsister’. The English prefix
step‑
comes from Old English stēop-, from Proto-Germanic
*steupa‑, meaning ‘orphaned’. So, a stepchild was originally an orphan, and from
that term came all the other ones by analogy, though some came much earlier than
others.
The Spanish suffix ‑astr‑o/a, comes from the Latin suffix
‑astr‑um (nominative ‑aster), fem. ‑astr‑a(m), that added the meaning of ‘partial, incomplete
resemblance’ and was thus usually used in a pejorative sense. Thus, a philosophaster was basically a bad
philosopher. (New Latin poētaster is
the word for a failed or unskilled poet.) This suffix originated from a suffix in
Ancient Greek that formed nouns from verbs ending in -άζειν (‑ázein). A few words in Spanish still show this
original sense, such as Sp. camastro ‘rickety
old bed’ from cama ‘bed’. (Sometimes,
the form of the suffix is ‑astre, as
in pillastre ‘rascal’.) In addition to
the kinship terms just mentioned, we find this suffix in Latin words like pueraster ‘stout lad’, from puer ‘boy’. In Latin the word patraster came to be used as a somewhat negative
term for foster-father, step-father, and even father-in-law (= Lat. soccer, see below).
The word for ‘father-in-law’ in Latin was sŏcer (gen. sŏcerī, acc. sŏcerum) and the word for
‘mother-in-law’ was sŏcrus
(gen. sŏcrūs, acc. sŏcrum). These words
descended from Proto-Indo-European *swéḱuros
and *sweḱrúh₂, respectively, which
became *svekry in Proto-Slavic, *swekrū in Proto-Celtic, and *swegrō in Proto-Germanic. In Vulgar
Latin, Lat. sŏcrus
‘mother-in-law’ was changed to sŏcra,
adopting the more typical feminine ending of first declension nouns. It is from
this word that Spanish gets the word suegra ‘mother-in-law’. As for Sp. suegro ‘father-in-law’, it either
descends from Lat. sŏcerum
(accusative of sŏcer) or
else it was fashioned after the feminine form suegra, by replacing the typically feminine inflection ‑a with the typically masculine
inflection ‑o.
Along with suegro/suegra, Spanish has the terms consuegro and consuegra, which come from Vulgar Lat cōnsŏcrus and cōnsŏcra
(Classical Latin cōnsŏcer
and cōnsŏcrus), formed
with the prefix con‑ ‘with, together’
(note that these three-syllable words have ante-penultimate stress). These words
are used to refer to one’s children’s parents-in-law so, for instance, a consuegro is a daughter-in-law or a
son-in-law’s father.
Sp.
nuera ‘daughter-in-law’ comes from Vulgar
Lat.
nŏra, from an earlier Classical Lat.
nŭrus to which the inflection was
changed from ‑
us to ‑
a, commonly associated with feminine
gender, as in the case of
sŏcrus
(see above). The change in the word’s stem vowel from
ŭ to
ŏ (which, because it
was stressed, would change to
ue in
Old Spanish, would also seem to be due to the influence (contagion) of Vulgar
Lat.
sŏcra. In
other words, it is thought to be motivated by analogy with the Vulgar Lat.
sŏcra (see above).
The masculine equivalent of nuera ‘daughter-in-law’ in Spanish is yerno ‘son-in-law’. This is
a patrimonial word that comes from Latin generum
(nom. gener) ‘son-in-law’. This Lat. generum lost the initial g and the stressed short ĕ split into ie, as usual, but because it was word-initial, it came to be written
ye, since the [i̯] is always reinforced
in that position and turns into a semiconsonant in patrimonial words. Additionally,
the n and the r traded places too, after the intervening intertonic vowel was lost,
a not uncommon change from Latin to Old Spanish (cf. Part I, Chapter 10, §10.4.5).
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