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Lat. obvĭāre
Lat. obvĭāre is another verb that seems to be formed following
the same pattern as the previous ones, with the prefix ob‑ ‘in the way, against, toward’. This verb was several meanings
and thus translations. These meanings can be divided into two groups: ‘to withstand,
oppose, prevent, hinder, go against, to act counter to’ and, a very different
one, ‘to (go out to) meet’.
It does not seem, however, that this Latin verb was derived from
the verb viāre by addition
of a prefix. Rather, it was derived from the adjective obvĭus (fem. obvĭa,
neut. obvĭum), which meant
‘in the way’, ‘obvious’ and ‘meeting’, which is derived from the prefix ob‑ and the root vi‑ of the noun vĭa
‘way’. This Latin adjective is the source of the cognates Sp. obvio/a ~ Eng. obvious, borrowed in the 16th century in English and the 17th in
Spanish. Note that English changed the ‑us
inflectional ending of the Latin word with the ending ‑ous, which is typically the reflex of the Latin derivational suffix
‑ōs‑us/a, cf. Sp. ‑os-o/a.[1]
The Latin adjective obvĭus
seems to have been derived from an adverbial phrase consisting of preposition plus
noun: ob viam ‘in the way, towards, against, etc.’. In other words, the adjective
obvius came first, derived from the
phrase, and was then turned into the verb obvĭāre
by the changing of the inflectional endings without the addition of any
derivational affixes.
Eng. obviate is a learned
16th century loan from the Latin verb obvĭāre’s
passive participle obvĭātus. Actually, it seems that the post-classical
Latin noun obvĭātĭōn‑, derived from this verb, was borrowed
into English first, in the early 15th century, resulting in the noun obviation, which was used at different
times with the two main senses that the verb had in Latin: (1) ‘the action of
preventing or avoiding something by anticipatory measures; prevention’, a
meaning that obviation still has today in English, and (2) ‘the action of
meeting or encountering something; contact with or exposure to something’, a
meaning that is today obsolete (OED).[2]
The English verb
obviate means ‘to anticipate and
prevent (as a situation) or make unnecessary (as an action)’ (MWALD) and it is
thus a synonym of the verb prevent,
e.g. This new evidence obviates the need
for any further enquiries and Disaster
was obviated by the opening of the reserve parachute (OALD). English obviate translates into Spanish as hacer innecesario (lit. ‘to make
unnecessary’), eludir (cf. Eng. elude), evitar (lit. ‘to avoid’), and even by the very rare cognate verb obviar, a transitive verb that means ‘to
avoid, to shun, to remove obstacles or problems’ (Sp. ‘evitar,
rehuir, apartar y quitar de en medio obstáculos o inconvenientes’, DLE).
Curiously, Spanish
had a patrimonial verb uviar derived from
Lat. obvĭāre, now obsolete, which meant ‘to come to,
arrive’ (‘acudir, venir, llegar’, DRAE). This sense obviously came from one of
the senses of the Latin verb obvĭāre that we saw earlier, namely ‘to come
out to meet’.
Sp. extraviar
Sp. extraviar ‘to mislay, lose’ would
also seem to be formed from the same pattern that we have seen before: Latin preposition
+ vĭāre. There
is a Latin preposition extra ‘outside
of, without, beyond, etc.’, but there is no Latin verb *extravĭāre and no other Romance languages seem to have cognates
of it. This Spanish verb appears to be a neologism, created in Spanish, first seen
in a dictionary in the 18th century. It is primarily a fancy synonym for the sense
‘to mislay, lose’ of the verb perder,
e.g. Extravié las llaves ‘I lost my
keys’. (The first definition or sense of this verb in the DLE is ‘to lose
something or to not know or forget where it is’.) As expected, the reflexive
(pronominal) form of this verb, extraviarse,
translates as ‘to get lost’, e.g. Me
extravié ‘I got lost’, Se me
extraviaron las llaves ‘I lost my keys’. There is at least one set
expression formed with this verb, namely extraviar
la mirada ‘to avoid looking at something or someone, to avert one’s eyes’. Curiously,
this verb was much more common in the 19th and early 20th century than it is
today and thus there is an archaic feeling to it, which is probably what makes
it seem rather fancy or formal.
Note that though there is no Latin verb *extravĭāre, there
is a phrase extra viam in Latin that
means ‘outside the road’ and which could have influenced the creation of this
neologism in the way that the phrase ob
viam is the source of the Latin adjective obvius and, thus, of the verb
obvĭāre (see above). There is no evidence for that,
however. Do note that the phrase extra
viam is used as a technical term in common law. It is used for instance in
the phrase extra viam rights, which
means
The right of a traveler upon the highway to travel over the
abutting property where the highway is out of repair and impassable for
practical purposes. 25 Am J1st High § 615. The right of one having an easement
of way to depart from the regularly traveled way or path and pass over the
abutting land of the servient owner where the latter has obstructed the private
way or made it impassable. 25 Am J2d Ease § 70’ (Ballentine’s law dictionary).
Other minor (and less common) senses of the verb extraviar are ‘to mislead’ (a person), ‘to
make someone get lost’, or ‘to lead astray’. The reflexive version of this verb,
extraviarse, has the intransitive meaning,
namely ‘to get lost’, ‘to get mislaid’, ‘to go missing’, as well as ‘to lose one’s
way’ (syn. perderse). Other senses are
‘to go astray’ and ‘to be mistaken’.
The associated noun is extravío
‘loss’ and the associated adjective is derived from the past participle, namely
extraviado/a ‘lost’. The primary
meaning of the fancy and rare noun extravío
is ‘the action or result of losing something or getting lost’, which is
synonymous with the noun pérdida
‘loss’, e.g. Han denunciado el extravío
de un paquete postal ‘They have reported the loss of a package’ (GDLEL).
Another, less common sense of this noun is ‘bad or altered habits or behavior’,
e.g. los extravíos de la sexualidad ‘sexual
deviations’ (AEIV).
[1] The derivational suffix in question was ‑ōs‑, followed by the nominative inflexional
endings (masculine) ‑us, (feminine) ‑a, and neuter ‑um. looked like ‑ōs‑us. English did this spelling change with many other Latin adjectives ending
in ‑us that it borrowed.
[2] The noun obviation has
acquired a new sense in modern American linguistics, one introduced by Leonard
Bloomfield in 1927, namely ‘the marking of a subsidiary third person (in
Algonquian and certain other languages); the expression of the obviative [case].
Cf. obviative n. and adj.’ (OED).
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