[GO TO THE LISTING OF ALL THE PARTS OF THIS CHAPTER]
embalaje (1822) means ‘the action or
result of packaging goods’ and ‘packaging materials’, e.g. reciclaje de
embalajes ‘recycling of packaging materials’, el embalaje de las obras
de arte es una tarea complicada ‘the packing of works of art is a
complicated affair’ (VOX). The packaging that this refers to tends to be larger
in size than that referred to by the noun empaquetado or empaque
‘packaging’.[1]
Sp. embalaje is said
to be a 16th century loanword from Fr. emballage
[ɑ̃.ba.laʒ] ‘packaging, wrapping’, a word created in the 13th century (Corominas).
Note, however, that there is a Catalan cognate of this word, also from the 13th
century, which may have played a role in the borrowing of the word into Spanish.
Fr. emballage is derived from the verb
emballer ‘to package, wrap, bale up’
by means of the suffix ‑age. Spanish also
borrowed the verb embalar ‘to pack, wrap,
package, bale up’ from French and derived its own antonym verb, desembalar ‘to unpack’. Spanish even derived
an antonym of embalar, namely desembalar (the French equivalent is déballer: dé-ball-er), from which we get the noun desembalaje ‘the act of unpacking’.
The French verb emballer
and the derived noun emballage are
ultimately derived from the noun balle,
by means of the prefix en‑, used in
French much like in Spanish (cf. Part I, Chapter 5,
§5.6.1).
To that, the verbal inflections were added in the case of the verb, such as the
infinitive ending ‑er, or the
derivational suffix ‑age in the case
of the noun: cf. en+balle+er/age. Fr.
balle means several things: ‘bullet’,
‘ball’, ‘bale’, ‘chaff’, etc., since there are three different sources for this
word, which should actually be seen as three separate words.
The French word balle
that we are interested in, the one that means ‘large bundle, package’, was borrowed
into Old French as bale from Frankish
*balla ‘ball’ in the 13th century
with the meaning ‘rolled-up bundle, packet of goods’ (Frankish was a West
Germanic language related to English; Sp. fráncico).
French balle is the Spanish word bala, not the one that means ‘bullet’,
but the one that means ‘bale’, that is, ‘a large wrapped or bound bundle of
paper, hay, or cotton’ (COED). More specifically, this Spanish bala is ‘tight bundle of merchandise,
and especially those being shipped’ (DLE) and it is not a common word today. It
is partially synonymous with the words fardo
and paca. Sp. bala presumably came from Catalan in the 13th century, which came
from Old French balle ‘ball’, which
came from Frankish balla ‘ball’.
Actually, Eng. bale is also a
borrowing from French, from the early 14th century. (Eng. bale is unrelated to any of the four homophonous words bail in English.)
As we can see from the source of Fr. balle, this word is a cognate of Eng. ball, which is not a loanword, since it descends from Old English *beall or *bealla ‘round object, ball’ (cf. Old Norse bǫllr ‘ball’). Ultimately, these words go back to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European
word *bʰoln‑ ‘bubble’ derived from
the Proto-Indo-European verbal root *bʰel‑
‘to blow, inflate, swell’. All words in Romance that are cognate with this word
are loanwords from Germanic, since no direct descendants of this
Proto-Indo-European root exist in Latin or Romance.
As for the other word bala,
the one that means ‘bullet’ or ‘projectile’, some Spanish dictionaries bundle it
with the other bala that means ‘bale’
since the two come ultimately come from the same Germanic source. However, the
two words came into the language at different times and through different
intermediaries. The bala that means
‘bullet’ seems to come from Italian palla,
meaning both ‘ball’ and ‘bullet’ (Corominas). Italian took this word from an
old Germanic language of northern Italy, Lombardic (also known as Langobardic).
The original Lombardic word was palla
and it meant both ‘ball (to play with)’ and ‘bullet (projectile)’, which was
obviously a cognate of Eng. ball,
coming from the same Proto-Germanic ancestor.
Finally, let us look at Eng. bullet, which is unrelated to the other words we just saw. One
might have suspected that this word is related to the word for ‘ball’, but it
is not. It comes from French boulette,
diminutive of boule ‘ball’, cognate
of Sp. bola ‘ball’, which, again, are
not related to Eng ball. These words
come ultimately from Latin bŭlla
‘bubble, a swollen or bubble-shaped object’, which is thought to be a loan from
Celtic that goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *beu ‘swelling’. The Latin verb bŭllīre
‘to bubble; to boil’ is derived from this noun and is the source of Eng. boil and Sp. bullir ‘to boil, bubble up, etc.’ (the Spanish nouns bulla and bullicio both meaning ‘racket, row, ruckus’ is derived from this
verb). In other words, Eng. bullet is
related to Sp. bola ‘ball’, but not
related to Eng. ball. Thus, the words
Eng. ball and Sp. bola, which qualify as cognates using
the ‘learning’ definition of the word cognate,
do not qualify as cognates by using the etymological definition that we use in
this book.
engranaje (1869) is a 19th century
loanword from Modern French engrenage [ɑ̃.ɡʀə.ˈnaʒ],
a word created in the early 18th century. The two words have the same meanings,
the primary one being ‘the engagement of two or more toothed wheels’ (VOX). The
word eventually also came to refer to the parts that engage in such wheels, the
gears or cogs in a machine, that is to say, ‘the gear system meshing to
transmit movement of one rotation shaft to another’ (GR) or ‘the set of gear
wheels and parts that fit together and are part of a mechanism or a machine’
(VOX). The word engranaje is often used in the plural, as engranajes,
just like English gear is often used in the plural to refer as gears,
e.g. Sp. el engranaje (or los engranajes) de un reloj ‘the
gears of a clock’. Note that the English noun gear is only equivalent to
Sp. engranaje in this specific meaning, not the other meanings that Eng.
gear has. The two words are not fully equivalent in this mechanical
either. Eng. gear, for instance, has a derived sense ‘a particular
setting of engaged gears: [e.g.] in fifth gear’ which translates into Spanish
as marcha or velocidad, e.g. Este carro tiene cinco
marchas/velocidades ‘This car has five gears’.[2]
The French noun engrenage
was derived from the verb engrener [ɑ̃.ɡʀə.ˈne] which, in mechanics, means ‘to gear, mesh, engage’. The
verb is quite old however, from the 12th century, and the verb was used in
agriculture with the meaning ‘to feed or fill the hopper with grain’, a meaning
this verb still has. The verb was formed with the prefix en‑ ‘in’ and the noun grain
‘grain’ (cf. patrimonial Sp. grano
and Eng. grain, a loanword from
French). This verb is not related to Eng. ingrain
or engrain, though it comes from the phrase
in graine, which contains the same noun graine ‘grain, seed’, actually graine
d’écarlate ‘scarlet seed’, a dye.[3]
Note that Fr. engrener is
occasionally spelled as engrainer and
pronounced [ɑ̃.ɡʀɛ.ˈne] or [ɑ̃.ɡʀe.ˈne].
It seems that the mechanical meaning of engrener arose in the mid-17th century from a mistaken corruption of
an earlier adjective encrené
‘notched’, derived from the noun *cren
‘notch, indentation, slot’, which in Modern French is cran ‘notch, cut, hole (as in a belt)’ (cf. Sp. muesca, agujero). This noun is derived from the verb crener (Modern créner)
that meant ‘to notch, to nick; to cut’, which is thought to come ultimately
from the Latin noun crēna ‘incision,
notch’, a word with a very obscure history (OED). Actually, the word crena appears in the OED, which appears
to have taken it from The New Sydenham
Society’s Lexicon of Medicine and the Allied Sciences (1878-1899), though it
is not found in other major dictionaries of English. According to the OED, it
is mostly a technical term in Botany and Zoology with the following meanings ‘an
indentation, a notch; spec. in Botany
one of the notches on a toothed or crenated leaf; Anatomy the depression or groove between the buttocks; the
longitudinal groove on the anterior and posterior surface of the heart (New
Sydenham Soc. Lexicon)’ (OED).
Spanish also borrowed the verb engranar ‘to engage, mesh, interlock’ from French engrener in the 19th century (DRAE 1884).
This verb has pretty much replaced an earlier verb endentar, derived from the root dent‑
‘tooth’ (en-dent-ar) and which is
still in use with the meaning ‘engage; mesh, interlock; indent’.[4]
Note that Spanish changed the middle e of
the French words engrener and engrenaje to a: engranar and engranaje. This no doubt was done
because of the perceived connection to the word for ‘grain’ in the original
word, which in Spanish is grano.
[1] Sp. empaquetado
is a noun derived from the masculine past participle of the verb empaquetar ‘to pack, put into a
package’, itself derived from the noun paquete
‘package’, a loanword from Fr. paquet,
a diminutive of the Dutch pak, a
cognate of Eng. pack (cf. Eng. package below). A synonym of empaquetado is the noun empaque derived by conversion from the
verb empacar ‘to pack into boxes,
etc.’ and ‘to bale’ (in Spanish America it also means ‘pack suitcases’, which
in Spain is known as hacer las maletas.
Another word for
‘packaging’ in Spanish is envase, a
noun derived from the verb envasar
that means ‘to can’ when packing food into cans, ‘to bottle’ when packing
liquids into bottles, and ‘to pack’ when packing things into packages or boxes.
The noun envase can also translate as
container and it refers primarily to the packaging that is in direct contact
with the merchandise, such as a bottle or the wrapping for a product. The verb envasar, attested in the 16th century,
is derived from the noun vaso
‘drinking glass’, from Vulgar Latin vasum,
from Latin vās vāsis ‘a vessel, dish; also, a utensil, implement of
any kind’ (L&S): en‑vas‑ar.
[2] The ‘equipment’ sense of the English noun gear translates as equipo (lit. ‘equipment’, but another sense of equipo is ‘team’), the ‘belongings’ sense translates as efectos personales, cosas, or pertenencias
and the ‘clothes’ sense as ropa.
[3] Eng. engrain
or ingrane originally meant ‘to dye a
fabric red with cochineal or kermes’ and, later on, with any fast dye. This
verb was equivalent to the phrase to dye
in grain. Some point to a 16th century French verb engrainer ‘to dye’ as the source, though it is not clear what
language came up with the verb first. What there is no doubt about is that it comes
ultimately from the French phrase en
graine ‘fast-dyed’, where graine
meant ‘cochineal dye’ also known as ‘kermes’. The English verb engrain/ingrain now means ‘firmly fix or establish (a habit, belief, or
attitude) in a person’ (COED). The phrase to dye in grain has been
reinterpreted in English to mean ‘to impregnate the very substance of the
material with the dye, to dye the wool before it is woven’, as if this grain meant something close to what the
normal word grain means in English,
something like ‘unprocessed fiber’.
[4] Sp. endentar
means ‘to fit/gear/interlock one thing into another by means of teeth or
notches’ (Sp. ‘encajar
una cosa en otra por medio de dientes o muescas’, MM) as well as ‘to put teeth
on a wheel’ (Sp. ‘poner dientes a una rueda’, DLE), e.g. Tengo que endentar la cadena de la bicicleta porque se ha salido ‘I
have to engage the teeth of the bicycle chain because it came out’ (Clave).
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