This is Part 4. Go to Part 3
Words derived from Eng. emotion and Sp. emoción
In an earlier section (§55.1.4)
we saw that Spanish had derived the verb emocionar and the adjective emocionate from the noun emoción, both of which were related to
the ‘excitement’ sense that the word emoción has, not the other sense that it
shares with Eng. emotion. In this
section we are going to look at two adjectives found in both English and
Spanish as cognates which are related to their respective nouns: Eng. emotional ~ Sp. emocional and Eng. emotive
~ Sp. emotivo/a.
The English adjective emotional
was derived in English in the early 19th century out of the noun emotion by addition of the Latinate
suffix ‑al that forms adjectives. It
is first attested in 1821, with the meaning ‘related to or having to do with
emotions’. A couple more senses were added to this word later on, namely the
sense ‘characterized by or arousing intense feeling: an emotional speech’ (COED) and, when used in reference to people,
a third sense that can be defined as ‘emotionally affected; upset’, as in He got all emotional (COED). The French cognate of Eng. emotional, namely émotionnel (fem. émotionnelle),
is not attested until 1875, so it is quite likely that it was a calque from the
English word. The Spanish cognate emocional
does not appear in a dictionary until 1917 and it is quite likely a calque from
either English or French.
The English adjective emotive,
pronounced [əˈmoʊ̯ɾɪv] or [əˈmoʊ̯ɾɪv] ([ᵻˈmə̯ʊtɪv]
in the UK), is much less common and it seems to have been also created in
English first, out of the stem emot‑
of noun emotion and the Latinate
suffix ‑ive that also produces
adjectives. Although there is an example of a noun emotive from 1596, the adjective emotive with something close to its current meaning is from the
first half of the 19th century. Its French cognate émotif (fem. émotive) is
first attested in the second half of the 19th century (1877) and Sp. emotivo/a does not appear in a
dictionary until 1917 (in the DRAE in 1925), so it is quite likely that the two
latter words are ultimate loans from English too.
The meaning of Eng. emotive is primarily ‘arousing intense
feeling: animal experimentation is an emotive
subject’, which makes it a synonym of the second sense of the word emotional that we just saw. Some
dictionaries mention other senses. Many dictionaries give a sense for this word
that is like the first sense of the word emotional,
namely ‘of or relating to the emotions’ (MWC, no example given). This same dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s
Collegiate, renders the ‘arousing’ sense as ‘appealing to or expressing emotion’
(MWC). Again, because this is a fancy or rare word, there seems to be variation
as to how it is used, even by the people who do use it.
emotional:
1. related to emotion(s)
2. arousing emotions (~ emotive)
3. aroused/affected
by emotions
|
emotive
1. arousing emotions
(2. related to
emotion(s) ?)
|
Although the English adjectives emotional
and emotive have cognates in Spanish, which may very well be both loans from
English, Sp. emocional and emotivo/a are not always necessarily the
best translations of Eng. emotional
and emotive, respectively, though
some bilingual dictionaries say they are equivalent without fully explaining
the differences. Sp. emocional can mean ‘relating to
emotions’, just like Eng. emotional,
as in the phrase estado emocional
‘emotional state’. Dictionaries differ as to whether Sp. emocional has the two other senses that we just saw of Eng. emotional. Some do not mention such
senses, such as María Moliner’s dictionary. Others say Sp. emocional has sense #3 above, such as the Academies’ DLE, which
give ‘sensitive to emotions’ (‘sensible a las emociones’) as the second sense of
emocional, which it says is a synonym
of emotivo (see below). Clave is
another dictionary that gives this second sense of emocional (‘Que se deja llevar por las emociones’), giving the
example: Es una persona muy emocional, y
a veces no se puede controlar ‘He is a very emotional person and sometimes
he cannot control himself’. The Vox dictionary, on the other hand, gives sense
#2 as the (only) second sense of the word emocional:
‘that produces or tends to produce emotion’ (‘Que produce emoción o tiende a hacerlo:
una película emocional’).
As for the adjective emotivo/a,
all Spanish dictionaries agree that it has three senses, namely basically the
three senses we just saw that Eng. emotional
has, though there is little doubt the two words are not equivalent or good
translations of each other. Dictionaries tell us that Eng. emotive translates into Spanish as emotivo/a. As for Sp. emotivo/a,
one dictionary, Vox, tells us that it can be translated either as emotional when referring to a person
(sense #3 of emotional), as moving or touching when referring to an act (sense #2), and as emotive, stirring, rousing (sense
#2) when referring to words. Other dictionaries, however, differ somewhat as to
the exact translations of Sp. emotivo/a
in different contexts. This is probably due to there being some variation in
how this word is used in Spanish, variation which may be dialectal and perhaps
at least in part due to the influence of how the cognates of this word are used
in other languages, such as English.
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