Other words derived ultimately from Lat. quătĕre
Lat. recŭtĕre
The Latin verb recŭtĕre was derived from Lat. quătĕre by means of the prefix
re‑ ‘back, again’. Its meaning has been described as ‘to strike back or
backwards’, ‘to cause to rebound’ (L&S), and/or ‘to strike so as to cause
to vibrate’ (WLED). This verb has not been borrowed by English at any time, but
it made it into Spanish as a patrimonial word, one that is rare but still in limited
use today, namely recudir. This verb was quite common in Old Spanish had
a number of meanings at the time, meanings that curiously are quite different
from those of its Latin etymon, most of which are obsolete today. The verb is
still found in major dictionaries, where most senses are marked as obsolete (ant.),
such as ‘to reply’ (= replicar, responder in Modern Spanish) or
‘to go to a place’ (= acudir in Modern Spanish) (MM). The senses that
are not marked obsolete should probably be marked as dialectal or archaic. The
following are the two supposedly current senses of recudir in Spanish according
to María Moliner’s dictionary: ‘return to the starting point’ and ‘to go and
pay or give someone their due’ (MM).[1]
Although clearly the verb recudir [re.ku.ˈðiɾ] is not a common one these days in Spanish, there is
evidence that another Spanish verb, one that is much more common today than recudir,
was created out of this verb, namely the verb acudir. Sp. acudir
is first attested around the year 1330 and there is consensus among the
scholars that this verb is nothing but a modification of an earlier recudir,
created as a variant of it, by replacing the prefix re‑ ‘back, again’
with the prefix a‑ ‘to’. There is no Latin verb that acudir could
have come from and the meanings of this verb are all the same that recudir used
to have (DCECH). The reason for this change in prefix was presumably that the
verb recudir had come to have meanings that did not agree with the
prefix re‑ that typically meant ‘back’ or ‘again’. The verb recudir
was very frequent in Spanish in the 12th and 13th centuries but then in the
14th century, when acudir was created, this verb began to replace recudir,
until it become quite common by the early 15th century, coming close to
replacing its source.
The verb acudir [a.ku.ˈðiɾ]
does not have a simple translation into English. The DLE gives 11 senses for
this word, but many are rare. Thus, in explaining this word’s meaning, we will
follow the definitions in Diccionario de Uso del Español de América y España
VOX, which gives us just three senses for this word, which can often be
seen as synonyms of the verb ir ‘to go’:
1.
‘for a person to go somewhere either of one’s
own accord or from a summons’, e.g. acudir a una cita ‘to go to/keep an
appointment’
2.
‘for something to come someone, especially
memories or mental images’, e.g. todos los recuerdos de su niñez acudieron a
su mente ‘all her childhood memories went/rushed into his head’
3.
‘to resort to someone or something to get help
in order to obtain some benefit’, e.g. acudir a un abogado ‘to go/resort
to a lawyer’, acudir al diccionario ‘to go/turn to the dictionary’[2]
As you can see, you can always translate acudir
with the verb to go, so you can think of acudir as a fancy was of
saying ‘to go’. However, in the first sense at least, one gets an additional
sense of going somewhere because of a summons. All of these uses of acudir
are somewhat literary or fancy in modern Spanish, however, though they are by
no means rare and the word acudir can be said to be known to all native
speakers of Spanish, unlike the word recudir, which is much rarer.
As to why Old Spanish recudir had acquired meanings
that were so different from those of its Latin etymon recŭtĕre, which
clashed with the meaning of the prefix re‑, it has been argued that this
is due to a confusion of this verb in Romance times with the similar-sounding
Latin verb recurrĕre ‘to run again/back’, a verb that Spanish has
borrowed in recent times as recurrir. The passive participles also
sounded very similar, recussus vs. recursus, which were also often
confused. (Romance or Proto-Romance is the name given to the common
language that descended from Vulgar Latin before it morphed into the different
Romance languages, cf. Part I, Chapter 3.)[i]
Thus, presumably the ancestor of recudir in Romance took on meanings
from Romance recurrir, which were derived from those of Lat. recurrĕre.
As we mentioned, Modern Spanish has the verb recurrir,
meaning ‘to appeal (something legally)’ and ‘to resort/turn (to someone)’. This
Spanish verb is a relatively recent loanword from Latin, not a patrimonial
word. It is a cognate of Eng. recur, a late 14th century loanword from
Latin. Eng. recur means most basically ‘to occur again’, but when said
of a thought or image, ‘to come back to one’s mind’, and used transitively (recur
to) ‘to go back to in thought or speech’ (COED). As we can see, the
cognates Eng. recur ~ Sp. recurrir are false friends. Eng. recur
translates into Spanish as repetirse in most cases but also reproducirse
such as when speaking of an illness, for example, whereas Sp. recurrir
translates into English as to appeal to, to resort to, or to
turn to. Incidentally, Lat. recurrĕre was derived by prefixation
from the verb currĕre ‘to run, to move quickly’, the source of
patrimonial Sp. correr, which also means ‘to run’ and ‘to move quickly’.
Although it is probably right that acudir was derived
from recudir by replacement of the prefix, as the experts maintain, it
is curious that Old Spanish speakers felt a need to replace the prefix re‑
of recudir by a‑ resulting in acudir. The reason is that there
is no evidence for native speakers of Old Spanish that the initial element re‑
of recudir was a prefix at all.
That is because the base ‑cudir is meaningless in Spanish since there is
no verb *cudir in this language, just like it is unlikely that Modern
English speakers associate the segment re‑ in the word retain
with the prefix re‑ since there is no verb *tain in English. (In
Spanish on the other hand, retener ‘to retain’ is clearly tied to the
verb tener ‘to have, hold’, just like recorrer ‘to travel over,
etc.’ is tied to correr ‘to run’.) This is a weakness in the argument
that the re‑ was replaced by a‑ for the reason mentioned.
[1] The original says: ‘retroceder al punto de partida’ and ‘pagar o asistir a alguien con
algo que le toca y debe percibir’ (MM).
[2] The original says: 1.
‘Ir [una persona] a un lugar por propia iniciativa o por haber sido llamado’;
2. ‘Presentarse [una cosa] a una persona, en especial recuerdos o imágenes
mentales’; 3. ‘Recurrir a alguien o algo y valerse de su ayuda para conseguir
un provecho’ (Vox).
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