[GO TO THE LISTING OF ALL THE PARTS OF THIS CHAPTER]
chantaje (1925) ‘blackmail’ is a
synonym of extorsión ‘extortion’ and perhaps even coacción ‘coercion’.[1]
This too is an early 20th century loanword from French, namely from Fr. chantage
‘blackmail’, a word first attested in 1837, derived from the verb Fr. chanter
‘to sing’, a cognate of Sp. cantar and of Eng. chant (cf. Part
II, Chapter 6).
The sense of the verb chanter
that chantage developed from is a
figurative one that this verb has in the idiomatic expression faire chanter quelqu’un that literally means
‘to make somebody sing’ and, figuratively, ‘to blackmail somebody’.[2]
Curiously, the word chantage is found
in some English dictionaries, which presented as a French foreign loanword,
first used in English in 1874 and synonymous with blackmail. It is fair to say that not many English speakers would
recognize this as an English word, whereas its Spanish cognate is a common word
in that language.
Spanish has developed a few words from the loanword chantaje. The most basic one is the verb
chantajear ‘to blackmail’, which
first appears in the DRAE in 1983. This verb is formed by using the most common
Spanish suffix that derives verbs from nouns: ‑e‑ar, as in guerrear ‘to
wage war’ (< guerra ‘war’; cf.
Part I, Chapter 5,
§5.6.2.1).
The English equivalent is to blackmail,
a verb derived from the noun blackmail
by conversion. It is also equivalent to Fr. faire
chanter, the expression we just saw from which chantage is derived. Sp. chantajear
is equivalent to the expression hacer
chantaje (i.e. hacerle chantaje a
alguien), a calque of the French expression, e.g. Me hacen chantaje ‘I’m being blackmailed, they’re blackmailing me’,
which is equivalent to Me chantajean.
Another word derived from chantaje is chantajista ‘blackmailer’,
formed with the agent suffix ‑ista. (Note
that this meaning is expressed in Modern French as maître-chanteur ‘lit. master singer’.) As for what to call a person
being blackmailed, a common expression is víctima
de (un) chantaje.
coraje (1832) is also a loan from
French, but a much earlier one than the other ones we have just seen, and the
source may have already existed in Vulgar Latin. Sp. coraje has two
different and somewhat distantly related meanings. One is ‘courage, bravery’,
synonymous with (rare) Sp. valentía (< valiente ‘courageous’),
arrojo ‘bravery, daring’ (< arrojar ‘to throw, etc.’), and valor
‘valor’ (note that Sp. valor can also mean ‘value’). The other meaning is
‘anger’, synonymous with rabia, ira, cólera, enojo.
Since the original meaning of the word in the original French was ‘bravery’, it
would seem that this second sense was perhaps derived from the first one by the
association between anger and the performance of fearless or daring actions.
Spanish borrowed the word coraje in the 14th century from Old French corage or curage ‘courage’,
later spelled courage, pronounced [ku.ˈʀaʒ] in Modern French. This word
is attested as early as the mid-11th century in French. Eng. courage is a cognate of Sp. coraje and it is also a loanword from
the same Old French word. It is also first attested in the 14th century.
Curiously, coraje does not appear in the DRAE until 1832, though it is found in
a dictionary already in 1505.
Versions of this word are found in several Romance
languages, such as Provençal and Catalan coratge,
and Italian coraggio. Thus, some
think that there may have been a Vulgar Latin *corāticum that this word descends from, though such a word is
unattested. Another possibility is that the word developed in one of these
languages and spread from there to the others. What is clear is that the word
is derived from the Latin noun cŏr
‘heart’ (genitive: cordis,
accusative: cor), which in Old French
was cor or cur, by means of the suffix ‑age.
This word is a cognate of Eng. core and
it is related to Sp. corazón ‘heart’.[3]
Interestingly, it seems that when coraje was first borrowed from French it was mostly used with the
‘anger’ sense that the word presumably developed in Spanish, not so much with
the ‘valor’ sense that the original French word had, though in later times the
‘valor’ sense became strong too, perhaps by the influence of the French word.
This obviously rendered the word dangerously polysemous and potentially
confusing, which is perhaps why some Spanish dialects tend to prefer to use
other words instead that are synonymous with the intended meaning. In (parts
of) Spanish-speaking America, the word coraje
is still commonly used with the ‘anger’ sense, but not so much in Spain, for
example, where other alternatives are more common nowadays, such as rabia. Both coraje and rabia are used
in very common expressions such as ¡Qué
coraje/rabia! ‘How upsetting!, How annoying!’ and Me da coraje/rabia ‘It makes me mad/angry’, though different
dialects tend to prefer one over the other.
There are a few Spanish words derived from the noun coraje, though they are not very common.
One of them is the adjective corajoso/a,
which is formed with the adjective-forming suffix ‑os‑o/a, cognate with Eng. ‑ous,
which would seem to make it a cognate of Eng. courageous. Strangely enough, corajudo
first appeared in the DRAE in 1729 (the first edition), before coraje did (it also appears in an
earlier dictionary from 1607). Of all the major Spanish dictionaries, the word corajoso only appears in the DLE, which
tells us that it means ‘angry, irritated’ (‘enojado, irritado’) and that it
once meant ‘spirited, energetic, brave/courageous’ (‘animoso, esforzado,
valeroso’). Thus, we see that the best way to translate Eng. courageous today is not corajoso/a, but rather valiente or even valeroso/a.
There is another Spanish word that means ‘courageous’ that
is also derived from coraje, namely corajudo/a, which is attested as early
as the 14th century and is not common today. This word, however, can also be
used with the sense ‘prone to anger’, particularly in Spain (synonym: colérico/a). The word is formed with the
Spanish suffix ‑ud‑o/a that forms
augmentatives, as in barbudo/a
‘bearded’, cabezudo/a ‘bigheaded’, tripudo/a ‘paunchy, big-bellied, pot-bellied’,
and peludo/a ‘hairy’.
An even rarer word derived from coraje is corajina ‘outburst of anger’, formed
with a rare suffix ‑in-a that can
mean intense and sudden action, as in regañina
‘scolding, telling-off, talking-to, tongue-lashing’ (< regañar ‘to scold, tell off, etc.’), (rare) degollina ‘slaughter, massacre’ (< degollar ‘to cut the throat of’), and escabechina ‘massacre’ (< escabechar
‘to souse, pickle; fam. to kill, bump
off, do in’).
Finally, there is a verb derived from the noun coraje. The verb is encorajar (en‑coraj-ar),
which means something like ‘to encourage’, in the sense of ‘cheering’. This
verb first appears in the DRAE in 1803 (also found in an earlier dictionary
from 1787). It is quite likely that Sp. encorajar
is a loanword from Old French encoragier
(Modern French encourager), which is
also the source of Eng. encourage
(first attested in the early 15th century). Actually, encorajar is a rare word today and bilingual dictionaries for the
most part do not suggest it as a translation of Eng. encourage. Better equivalents of Eng. encourage are animar (also,
though less commonly, embravecer and alentar) for the ‘cheer’ sense, and fomentar, favorecer, estimular for
the ‘stimulate’ sense. This verb can also be used reflexively, as encorajarse, and then it means ‘to get
furious, get angry’ (a derived synonym, also quite rare today, is encorajinarse).
[1] The English word blackmail has
nothing to do with mail as we
understand the word today (or with blackness for that matter). This is a mid
16th century expression used to refer to ‘a tribute levied on farmers in
Scotland and the border counties of England by freebooting Scottish chiefs in
return for protection or immunity from plunder’ (OED). The mail word is now obsolete as a separate word in Standard English,
but it has survived in Scots and in northern dialects of English. It used to
mean something like ‘payment, tax, tribute, rent’. It comes from Old English mal ‘lawsuit, terms, bargaining,
agreement’, a loanword from Old Norse mál
‘speech, agreement’ which was a cognate of the patrimonial English word mæl ‘speech’, now also obsolete. The black part of the expression refers to
the evil of the practice. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the term blackmail
was also used for ‘Rent payable in cattle, labour, or coin other than silver’
(OED), that is, rent known as silver mail
‘rent or tribute paid in silver’. By the late 18th century, blackmail had come to mean ‘any payment
or other benefit extorted by threats or pressure, especially by threatening to
reveal a damaging or incriminating secret’ (OED).
By the way, the
Modern English word mail that means ‘letters
and parcels sent by post’ (COED; Sp. correo)
has a different origin. It comes from Old French male, which comes from a Germanic word meaning something like
‘bag’, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *malhō
‘leather bag’. The rare spelling change of the vowel of this English word from a to ai
was done presumably to differentiate this word from the word male that means ‘of or denoting the sex
that can fertilize or inseminate the female to produce offspring’ (COED) or by
similarity with the mail that meant
‘rent, etc.’. (Eng. male comes from Old French masle, from Latin masculus,
source of Sp. macho.)
[2] In colloquial Spanish, the verb cantar ‘to sing’ has a figurative (non-literal)
meaning that involves revealing information. However, the meaning is quite
different from the one chanter has in
French, namely ‘to confess or reveal something secret or confidential, usually
after an interrogation’ (DUEAE: coloquial ‘Confesar
o revelar lo secreto o confidencial, generalmente tras un interrogatorio’),
e.g. El detenido ha cantado y ya se
conoce a los restantes miembros de la banda ‘The prisoner has talked and it
is known who the other members of the band are’. The English equivalents are to spill the beans, to talk, to confess.
[3] Whereas in most other Romance languages the
word for ‘heart’ comes directly from the Latin word cor, Spanish and Portuguese have ‘extended’ or ‘derived’ version so
this word: Sp. corazón (1100) and
Port. coração. There are several
theories as to how these words were derived and with what suffixes, though none
is fully convincing. Spanish conserved the patrimonial cuer from Lat. cŏr as late as the 13th century. As for why the original cuer was not preserved and was replaced
(by corazón), it has been suggested
that perhaps it was to prevent the confusion with the word cuero ‘(human or animal) skin’, from Lat. cŏrĭum (same meaning).
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