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Lat. dēlĭcĕre
The Latin verb dēlĭcĕre was derived from the verb lăcĕre
by the addition of the prefix dē‑ ‘from,
away from, etc.’ (dē‑lĭc‑ĕre). It was
a rare verb, with no perfect or supine forms that we know of, so its principal
parts were dēlicĭō, dēlicĕre, -, -. Its meanings were ‘to entice
away, allure from the right way’ and ‘delight’. Surprisingly, however, this verb
has left us more descendants in Spanish and English than any of its sisters, including
some cognates. The descendants we are referring do not come from the Latin verb
itself, however, but rather from Latin words derived from this verb.
From the verbal
stem dēlĭc‑, Latin derived a number
of words. One was the masculine noun dēlĭcĭus,
formed with the derivational suffix ‑ĭ‑
that meant ‘pleasure, delight, fun, activity affording enjoyment’ as well as
‘curiosities of art’, lit. ‘something enticing, alluring’ (dē‑lĭc‑ĭ‑us). This noun is found in a single Roman inscription. There
was also a feminine version, dēlĭcĭa,
with seemingly several meanings: ‘pleasure/delight/fun’, ‘activity affording
enjoyment’, ‘luxuries’, ‘ornaments, decorations’, ‘toys’, ‘erotic verse’ and, perhaps
more generally, ‘object of affection’. This feminine noun was typically used in
the plural, whose nominative form was dēlĭcĭae,
but with the singular meanings ‘delight, pleasure’, and it was also used as a
term of endearment that we could translated as darling or sweetheart. Note
that there was another word dēlĭcĭa
or dēlĭquĭa in Latin that meant ‘corner-beam
supporting an edifice’ and ‘gutter’, but this seems to have come from the first
conjugation verb dēlĭcāre or deliquāre, unrelated to the words we
just saw.
The noun dēlĭcĭa was borrowed into Spanish in the
early 15th century as delicia with the meaning ‘delight, pleasure,
treat’. The noun delicia seems to
have replaced in part the traditional noun deleite
‘delight’, which is related to the noun delicia
and is a cognate of Eng. delight, as
we will see in the next section. Actually, Sp. delicia can be said to have two senses since it can refer to a
feeling and to something that causes that feeling. The senses can be
paraphrased as: ‘vivid and intense sensation of pleasure’ and ‘thing that
causes a vivid and intense sensation of pleasure’. The first sense is often
found in the expression ¡Qué delicia (…)!
‘What a delight (…)’, as in ¡Qué delicia estar aquí sentados! ‘How nice it is sitting here!’. The second sense of this noun is often equivalent to the derived
English adjective delightful, e.g. Ese niño es una delicia ‘That boy is
delightful’ or El circo es la delicia de
los chiquillos ‘The circus is delightful to children’ (MM). There is even a
common tag with this word that can be added to any statement, namely …que es una delicia, as in Canta que es una delicia ‘She sings
delightfully’.
By adding the
adjective-forming suffix -ōs‑ (masc. -ōs‑us,
fem. -ōs‑a) to this noun, Late Latin derived the adjective dēlicĭōsus ‘delicious, delicate’, fem. dēlicĭōsa (dē‑lic‑ĭ‑ōs‑us/a). The original literal meaning was probably
‘enticing, alluring’. This adjective has given us the learned but today very
common cognates Eng. delicious [də.ˈlɪ.ʃəs] and Sp. delicioso/a
[d̪e.li.ˈθi̯o.so]. English
Spanish delicioso/a is first attested in writing
in the first half of the 13th century, two centuries before the noun delicia. English delicious [də.ˈlɪ.ʃəs]] entered the language around 1300 from French
delicieus (Mod.Fr. délicieux [de.li.ˈsjø], fem. délicieuse [de.li.ˈsjøz]), which is attested
in the early 12th century and is a loanword from Latin. This suggests that
Spanish also probably borrowed this Latin word through French as well. The
spelling of the English word already contained the ‑ous spelling from the very beginning, just like other English
borrowings of Latin adjectives with the suffix ‑ōs‑(us/a) (and many that didn’t, as we have already seen).
The cognates
Eng. delicious ~ Sp. delicioso/a are quite good friends, that
is, they have very similar primary meanings, namely ‘highly pleasant to the
taste’ (COED), which was not the original meaning of the Latin source-word. Both
of these cognates can also be used figuratively, mostly in literature, with the
meaning ‘delightful’, as in a delicious
revenge or a delicious irony in
English. In Spanish, one also often hears things such as El agua está deliciosa ‘The water is delightful’. Do note that
Spanish has other very common expressions to express the meaning ‘delicious’
referring to things that taste very well, such as sabroso and riquísimo/a
(superlative of rico/a). The
adjective divino/a is often used for
the non-taste related sense, equivalent to Eng. delightful. The use of the word delicious
for the apple variety in American English dates from 1903. There is a colloquial
shortening of this word, namely delish,
which dates to 1920.
Lat. dēlectāre
As we
mentioned earlier, there was a Latin verb dēlectāre that meant ‘to allure, attract,
delight, charm, please’. This word seems to have been derived from lactāre (see above) by addition of the
prefix dē, ‘from, away from, etc.’
and not from dēlĭcĕre.
Lat. dēlectāre looks like it could
have been a frequentative verb, but it cannot be a frequentative form of dēlĭcĕre, for it would have to come from
the stem of a passive participle *delectus
but there is no such word related to the words we are looking at. There was a passive
participle dēlectus in Latin, but it was
the participle of the verb dēlĭgĕre ‘to
pick off; select, choose’ and thus meant ‘picked off, selected, chosen’ and was
unrelated to dēlectāre or any of the
verbs we’re analyzing here. There is always the possibility, of course, that
there had been some contamination between dēlĭcĕre
and dēlĭgĕre due to sound and
meaning similarities.
The
principal parts of Lat. dēlectāre were
dēlectō, dēlectāre, dēlectāvī, dēlectātum. This verb has given us a semi-learned
word in Spanish, namely the verb deleitar ‘to delight, please, enchant’,
a verb often used reflexively as deleitarse,
which renders it intransitive, which translates as ‘enjoy a great deal, to take
delight in’, e.g. La música nos deleitó ‘The music delighted
us’, Nos deleitamos con música de Bach ‘We delighted in listening
to Bach’.
Sp. deleitar is attested in writings of the 13th
century already. Actually, Spanish also has a learned version of this verb,
namely delectar, which restores the
post-vocalic (syllable-final) ‑c‑
that many Romance languages converted to the semivowel ‑i‑. This is not a different verb and if you look for delectar in a Spanish dictionary, you
won’t find it in most of them, but at least one of the major ones, María Moliner, has it as an entry, and
it sends you to deleitar to look for
its meaning.
The sound change
from Latin ‑ct‑ to ‑it‑ was one of the early sound changes found
in many Romance languages and thus is very old. In Spanish patrimonial words, however,
the ‑it‑ then additionally changed to
‑ch‑ [ʧ], which is not what we find here.
If this was a purely patrimonial verb, one that descended orally from Vulgar
Latin to Old Spanish, we would have expected it to be delechar instead of deleitar.
In other words, Sp. deleitar seems to
be a Latin borrowing which came in early enough to have undergone some sound adaptations
to the phonology of Spanish, but not the full range of sound changes expected in
patrimonial words. So either it is a semi-learned word or else it came from
another Romance language, such as Occitan or Portuguese, that underwent the ‑ct‑ to ‑it‑ change but not the ‑it‑
to ‑ch‑ change. Corominas believes
this is a semi-learned word, but others argue that it is a loanword, probably
from Occitan. Some have argued that the ultimate source of Sp. deleite is Lat. delectum, but the only such Latin word is related to the verb dēlĭgĕre, not to the verbs dēlĭcĕre or dēlectāre. Besides, if that was the source, the noun would have
been *deleito or *delecho, not deleite, with a final e.
But do note that the Italian equivalent of Sp. deleite is diletto, with
an ‑o, which suggests it comes from a
Latin word ending in ‑um, which could
have developed in Late or Vulgal Latin of which we have no record.[1]
In addition to
the verb deleitar, Spanish has a noun
deleite
‘delight, pleasure (to any of the senses), delectation’, as in Tocó el
piano para nuestro deleite ‘She played the piano to our delight’.
This noun is already found in 13th century writings in the form deleit (Berceo).[2] It
came to replace a related word deliçio
which was used four times in the poem of the Cid, for instance, and which came
from Lat. delicium, a variant of delicia and deliciae. Old Spanish delicio
is now fully obsolete.
Sp. deleite typically translates into
English as delight. The two words are
most likely cognates, that is, come the same exact source word. We don’t know
for sure because it is not clear whether Sp. deleite was derived in Spanish from the verb deleitar by conversion, or whether it was borrowed from another
language, such as Provençal deliet.
It does not seem, however, that the nouns deleite
and delight descend from a common Latin
noun related to the verb dēlectāre,
however, since the only Latin nouns derived from this verb are dēlectātiō ‘delight, pleasure, amusement’
and dēlectāmentum ‘amusement, pastime’.
These two nouns cannot be the source of Sp. deleite,
but one of them is interesting to us since it resulted in words in English and
Spanish.
Lat. dēlectāmentum, formed with the suffix ‑mentum that indicated ‘instrument, medium,
or result’, has not made it into English or Spanish but Lat. dēlectātĭō has. This word is formed with
the suffix ‑ĭōn‑ attached to the
passive participle stem dēlectāt‑
(accusative: dēlectātĭōnem). Both
English and Spanish have borrowed this word, which is very fancy and formal in
both languages. One dictionary tells us that Eng. delectation, which means ‘pleasure and delight’, was borrowed in
the mid-14th century through French is formal
and chiefly humorous (COED). Old
French borrowed this word from Latin in the early 12th century (Modern French: délectation [de.lɛk.tɑ.sjɔ̃]). The also
very rare Sp. delectación is also
attested by the end of the 14th century and most likely it came through French
as well. We also find a semi-learned version of Sp. delectación, namely deleitación,
which is just as rare, if not more.
Let us look now at the source of Eng. delight, which is pronounced today as [dɪ.ˈlaɪ̯t] or [də.ˈlaɪ̯t].
In Old French, Lat. dēlectāre resulted
in the patrimonial verb delitier (also
spelled deleitier, deleter, and deliter), first attested in the 12th century, with the same meaning
as its Spanish cognate deleitar, namely
‘to please (greatly), charm’. In addition to Spanish deleitar (and delectar), other
cognates of this verb include Provençal delechar,
delettar or delectar, Portuguese deleitar,
and Italian delettare or dilettare. This verb was borrowed into English
as delite in the 13th century, also spelled
delit or delyt(e), among other ways, and pronounced [də.ˈlit] at the time. In the 16th century the spelling of this
word was changed to delight, under the
influence of the fixing of the spelling of unrelated patrimonial Germanic words
such as night and light, both of which had multiple
different possible spellings in Middle English (OED). This change was obviously
erroneous from an etymological perspective, unlike in the case of night and flight.[3]
Note that in the 14th century, French replaced this
patrimonial verb with a learned version of itself borrowed from written Latin,
namely délecter, which is a literary
word and is only used in reflexive form as se
délecter à ‘to delight in’. This French word is no doubt the source of the
very rare verbs Sp. delectar and Eng.
delect [dɪ'lɛkt], fancy alternatives
to deleitar and delight.
In English, delight
can also be a noun, which in Middle English was spelled delit or delite and also
pronounced [də.ˈlit], just like the verb. The
noun presumably comes not from the English verb by conversion but from Old
French delit or deleit, which was a noun derived from the stem of the Old French
verb deliter, which would make the
noun delight a cognate of Provençal deliet, Spanish deleite, and Italian diletto.
The form and pronunciation of the verb and the noun converged in English,
although they were different in Old French from where English took them. Thus,
in modern English, delight can be a verb
meaning ‘to please greatly’, as in She
delighted us with a song,
or a noun meaning ‘great pleasure’, as in I
felt delight, or ‘source of pleasure’, as in That child is a
delight. (Note that Old French
replaced
English
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Spanish
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Verb
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to delight
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deleitar
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Noun
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delight
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deleite
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The respective cognates are close in meaning, but not
always similar in use. The noun delight,
for instance, can be translated as deleite,
but usually better translations are placer,
gusto, alegría, when talking about the pleasure itself, and as encanto, delicia or placer when talking
about a source of pleasure (e.g. Este
niño es un encanto / una delicia ‘That child is a delight’). The intransitive,
reflexive form of Sp. deleitar, namely
deleitarse, translates as ‘to take delight/pleasure,
to revel/delight in’, as in Nos deleitamos con los sabrosos manjares ‘We delighted in the tasty delicacies’.
There is a
Latin adjective related to and derived from the verb dēlectāre that has been borrowed into English and Spanish, resulting
in fancy learned cognates. Latin dēlectābĭlis,
which is derived with the third-declension adjectival suffix ‑bĭl‑ (dē‑lect‑ā‑bĭl‑is) has given us the rare Eng. delectable and the even rarer Sp. delectable. Eng. delectable
can be synonymous of delicious, when
referring to food, and of delightful
‘highly pleasing’ in other contexts. Both of these synonyms are much more
common than the rare, fancy delectable,
however. Sp. delectable is obsolete
and one dictionary that mentions it, María Moliner, says it’s a less-preferred
variant of deleitable ‘that causes
delight’ and another dictionary, the DLE, says it’s a variant of deleitoso/a, which is perhaps even rarer
than delectable.
A much more common
adjective for the meaning ‘that causes delight’ in English is delighting and, especially, Eng. delightful, which are derived in English
from the noun delight by means of
native English suffixes. Sp. deleitante
is a possible equivalent of delightful.
It is formed in Spanish using the present participle ending ‑ante, but it is also quite rare compared
to Eng. delightful. The already
mentioned synonym deleitoso/a is even
rarer. The most common translations of the English adjective delightful ‘that causes delight’ are
other, unrelated words, such as encantador,
when referring to a person or a place, delicioso
when referring to food or a meal, muy
agradable or maravilloso/a (e.g. a
time), precioso/a (e.g. a dress), etc.
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[1] It. diletto can be a noun
meaning ‘delight, pleasure’ and also a noun and adjective meaning ‘beloved
(one)’. Note that there are two other words diletto
in Italian. One is related to the words we have been studying here, namely the
diletto that is the first-person singular present indicative of the verb dilettare ‘to please, delight’ (cognate
of Sp. deleitar), often used
reflexively as dilettarsi ‘to delight
in, to dabble’, as in dilettarsi a fare
or facendo ‘to delight in doing, to
enjoy doing’ or dilettarsi di musica
‘to dabble in music’ (cf. Sp. deleitarse).
The other diletto is the past
participle of the verb diligere ‘to
respect’.
[2] The loss of the final ‑e was
common in Old Spanish. Final e was
highly unstable in two periods of the history of Castilian. First in the
10th-11th centuries we find loss of final ‑e
after a dental or alveolar consonant (except t, which came from an earlier tt),
e.g. pane ‘bread’ > pan, mare
‘sea’ > mar, mese ‘month’ > mes, pace ‘peace’ > paz. Then, in the 13th century, some varieties of Castilian
displayed los of ‑e after almost any
consonant or consonant cluster. This seems to be the source of the attested
word deleit instead of deleite. By the 15th century, however,
the lost (apocopated) vowels in this second round had all been restored in all
dialects of Spanish.
The word deleit(e) does not seem to be found in
the Cid, despite what Corominas says about it. In the Cid poem one finds deliçio four times, which seems to be
equivalent to modern deleite, though.
Some modern versions of the poem in Modern Spanish translate this deliçio as deleite.
[3] The spellings night and flight had actually been used before
when when the gh represented the
sound [x] which existed in Old English. These letters are silent in these words
today, of course. Eng. delight never
had this sound, however. Other words that received a non-etymological gh spelling at this time were inveigh and sprightly.
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