Other words derived ultimately from Lat. quătĕre
Lat. percŭtĕre
The Latin verb percŭtĕre was derived from the verb quătĕre by means of the prefix
per‑, which itself comes from the preposition per that
meant ‘through, throughout’. As a prefix, it could also have the figurative
meaning ‘thoroughly, entirely, utterly’. As we saw, the primary meaning of this
verb was ‘to strike or pierce through’, though other, closely related senses
developed through time. Following the pattern of its sister verbs, already
seen, this verb’s principal parts were the following: present tense percŭtĭō, present infinitive percŭtĕre,
perfect tense percŭssī,
and passive participle percŭssus.
English borrowed this verb as percuss [pəɹ.ˈkʰʌs] in the 16th century, from the Latin verb’s passive
participle stem percŭss‑,
that is, the passive participle percŭssus minus the inflectional ending ‑us. The main
use of this rare English verb today seems to be in medicine, where it means ‘[to]
gently tap (a part of the body) as part of a diagnosis’ (COED), as in The
doctor percussed the patient’s chest (AHD).
We would expect Spanish to have a verb percutir, and
it does. It has the sense ‘to hit something repeatedly’ and it is also used
primarily in medicine, just like Eng. percuss, but it may be used in
other contexts as well, though it is rare. Some dictionaries give examples of
the non-medical use of percutir, such as El martillo de un arma
percute el cartucho y produce la chispa ‘A weapon’s hammer hits the
cartridge and produces the spark’ (Clave) and Ponte en pie y percute tu
timbal ‘Stand up and strike your kettledrum’ (Vox).
The word percutir is not a recent loan, since it is attested
already in 1525 (DCEH), but it has always been rare and it did not make its way
into the Academy’s DRAE until 1884, more than 100 years after the first edition
of the dictionary, though presumably the first time it appeared in a dictionary
was in 1855.[1]
French also has a cognate of these verbs, namely percuter
[pɛʀ.ky.ˈte], which is
first attested in writing in the second half of the 10th century with the
meaning ‘to destroy’. The word disappeared from the record and it is not
attested with its current meanings, which are very similar to those of its
English and Spanish cognates until 1610 and we are told that the word is rare before
1825 (LPR). Thus, there does not seem to be any continuity between the first,
early use, and the modern ones.
Much more common than the cognate verbs Eng. percuss
~ Sp. percutir are the nouns derived from the Latin noun that was
derived from the their source, the verb percŭtĕre, namely Eng. percussion
~ Sp. percusión. These nouns come from the Latin noun percŭssĭō (regular stem percŭssĭōn‑), derived from the stem percŭss‑ of the passive
participle percŭssus
of the verb percŭtĕre by addition of the
action-noun forming suffix ‑ĭōn‑.
Its meaning was ‘a beating, striking’ (L&S). A context-specific, derived
sense was ‘a beating time’, used ‘in music and rhetoric’ (L&S).
Eng. percussion [pəɹˈkʰʌʃən]
was borrowed from Latin in the mid-15th century with the meaning ‘a striking, a
blow’ and ‘internal injury, contusion’. The meaning of Eng. percussion has
changed somewhat since then and it is defined somewhat differently in different
dictionaries. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COED) gives us
three senses for this word, the first and main one having to do with musical
instruments, and two in which the word names different actions: a general one and
one having to do with medical sense mentioned for the verb percuss above:
·
‘the action of playing a musical instrument by
striking or shaking it’; when the noun is used as a modifier, then it means ‘[as
modifier] denoting musical instruments played in this way’; this noun can then
be used by itself (without a modified noun) to refer to ‘percussion instruments
forming a band or section of an orchestra’
·
‘the striking of one solid object with or
against another with some degree of force’
·
‘Medicine the action of percussing a part
of the body’
There is no basic difference between the meanings of
the English noun percussion and those of its Spanish cognate percusión
[peɾ.ku.ˈsi̯on], which means that the two words are very good friends
(cognates with very similar meanings) and must have influenced each other over
time. Of the three senses, the Academies’ dictionary (DLE) mention only two, omitting
the medical one, but other Spanish dictionaries mention all three such as María
Moliner’s Diccionario del uso. There is little doubt that the first of
these senses, the one referring to musical instruments, is the best known one,
being the only sense that many English dictionaries mention. This musical sense
for Eng. percussion is first attested in the late 18th century.
At this point we should mention that French also has a noun percussion,
pronounced [pɛʀ.ky.ˈsjɔ̃]
in Modern French. It is first attested in the late 12th century with the
spelling percution, and its meaning was ‘misfortune, trouble’ (= malheur)
(LPR). The musical sense of French percussion dates from the mid-17th
century, which leaves little doubt about this sense was borrowed by English and
Spanish for their cognates of this word (assuming that the words themselves were
not borrowed through French instead of through Latin as the official
dictionaries of these languages claim). Fr. percussion also has the
medical sense, which presumably goes back to the late 18th century (LPR), which
is earlier than when that same sense is attested in this word’s English and
Spanish cognates, which would seem to indicate that these languages borrowed
the sense from the cognate French word, a phenomenon known as semantic calquing
(cf. Part I, Chapter 4, §4.8.2).
There are a number of collocations in English and Spanish that
contain the word percussion, all of them part of technical language,
such as percussion tool ‘a power driven tool which operates by striking
rapid blows: the power may be electricity or compressed air’ (Collins) = Sp. instrumento
de percusión), percussion drill
(another name for hammer drill) = Sp. taladro de percusión, and percussion
gun = Sp. arma de percusión.
A fairly common noun derived from the noun percussion
is percussionist ‘one who plays percussion instruments’ (AHD). This word
created in English in the early 20th century, circa 1921, out of the noun
percussion and the suffix ‑ist of Greek origin. Spanish borrowed this
word at a later time as percusionista. It first appeared in the DRAE in
1992. The French cognate of this word is percussionniste, which is not
attested until 1966, leaving no doubt that English is the original source of
this word and that the French and Spanish words are loanwords from English.
The noun percussion is not the only English word
related to the verb percuss. English also has two adjectives related to
this verb: the very rare percussant, meaning ‘bent round and striking
the side (eg of a lion’s tail)’ (Chambers), and the slightly less rare percussive,
meaning ‘of, relating to, or characterized by percussion’ (AHD). They were both
formed in English from the Latinate suffixes ‑ant and ‑ive,
respectively, the former in the 19th century and the latter in the 18th
century. The words are so uncommon that many dictionaries do not carry them. Spanish
has no adjectives related to the verb percutir.
As we saw, the Spanish verb percutir is a loanword
from Latin percŭtĕre, a ‘learned word’ (Sp. cultismo) with only a
minor adaptation, namely the third conjugation inflectional ending ‑ir.
But Spanish does have a descendant of Lat. percŭtĕre that was uninterruptedly
transmitted through the ages by word of mouth, a patrimonial word that is a
cognate or doublet of percutir (cf. Part I, Chapter 1). The verb is percudir,
with the characteristic change (voicing) of the intervocalic Latin ‑t‑ to
Spanish ‑d‑ found in patrimonial Spanish words.
The verb percudir is rare in modern Spanish, though, and
it is mostly confined to some dialects. DCEH tells us that it was very common
in 16th century pastoral comedy, for example, where it was used with a variety
of different but related meanings. In Modern Spanish, perdudir has two
main meanings: ‘to tarnish, dull’ (= deslustrar, ajar), typically
used about skin complexion (Collins), and ‘to get (clothes) very dirty’ (=ensuciar;
cf. percudirse ‘to become ingrained with dirt’, OSD), e.g. Los años
percudieron las blancas paredes de la casa en que nací ‘The years had darkened
the white walls of the house in which I was born’ (GDLEL). Interestingly, in
earlier times percudir often appeared as percundir, with a nasal
consonant epenthesis in the word, a rare but not unheard-of phenomenon in sound
change. This ‑n‑ has led Corominas to argue that that percundir
is the source of the verb cundir ‘to spread, grow, etc.’ (Corominas
& Pascual, Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico = DCEH).
Other scholars argue, however, that the source of cundir is Lat. condīre
‘to pickle, to preserve (fruits); to season, make savoury (food)’ (cf. Eng. condiment
~ Sp. condimento).
[1] According to DIRAE (a ‘diccionario inverso basado en el Diccionario
de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española’), the first dictionary that
percutir appeared in was the Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua
española, Gaspar y Roig.
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