As we saw earlier, Lat. quăssāre, which meant ‘to
shake violently, shatter, impair, disturb, etc.’, is a so-called
‘frequentative’ or ‘intensive’ verb derived from the basic verb quătĕre. As all Latin frequentative
verbs, it is a first conjugation verb that was derived from the stem of the
source verb’s passive participle, in this case quăss‑ (from quăss‑us)
(cf. Part I, Chapter 8). This verb’s principal parts were present tense quăssō,
present active infinitive quăssāre, perfect active quăssāvī, and passive
participle quăssātus. In Medieval Latin, the verb quăssāre came
to mean ‘to shatter’.
Lat. quăssāre was passed on patrimonially (by
word-of-mouth) to some of the Romance languages. Thus, for example, it became quaissier
and quesser in Old French, which has derived into different words,
including Modern French casser [ka.ˈse], a very common verb now meaning ‘to break’, and Anglo-Norman
quaisser (among other spellings), which was borrowed into English as quash,
as we will see. Lat. quăssāre has been said to have given us two
patrimonial Spanish verbs: quejar and cascar, each derived from a
different Vulgar Latin version of Lat. quăssāre. Let us look at the Spanish and English reflexes
of this Latin verb now in turn.
Sp. quejar(se)
Sp. quejar [ke.ˈxaɾ]
is now thought to have come from Vulgar Latin *quassiare, a modified
version of classical Latin quăssāre, a variant that is not actually attested in
writing, but which is presumed to have existed because of the form of this
descendant in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in other Romance languages, as
we shall see. Actually, this is not the only theory as to the source of the
verb quejar. The origin of the word quejar has been the source of
much controversy over the years. As the great philologist Yakov Malkiel told us
in the middle of the 20th century, ‘[t]he origin of Sp. quejarse (OSp. quexarse),
Ptg. queixar-se ‘to complain’ and of their congeners has been one of the
most widely discussed problems of Hispanic etymology’. We will proceed here
with the assumption that quejar is indeed derived from Lat. quăssāre, as most scholars
believe today.[1]
In Modern Spanish, the verb quejar is strictly a
pronominal (reflexively conjugated) verb, that is, it is always conjugated as quejarse
(de), and its main meaning is ‘to complain (about)’, e.g. Los vecinos se
quejaron del ruido ‘The neighbors complained about the noise’ or ¿De qué
te quejas? ‘What are you complaining about?’. However, Sp. quejar can
also mean ‘to moan, groan (from pain)’ in some contexts and thus can be
translated into English by the verbs moan or groan, e.g. Se
quejaba mientras le quitaban los puntos ‘He was making complaining noises
as they were removing the stiches’ (Gran Diccionario de la Lengua Española Larousse).
The verb quejar appears very early in Old Spanish
written records, such as the Cid, from the early 13th century and it was a
rather common verb at the time. In Old Spanish, the verb was spelled quexar,
pronounced [ke.ˈʃaɾ], or queixar. Note
that the letter 〈x〉 spelled the sound [ʃ] in Old Spanish, the same as
the sound spelled 〈sh〉 in English, as in the word sheep
[ˈʃip] or cash
[ˈkʰæʃ]. Around the 16th century,
the sound [ʃ] in Spanish
(spelled 〈x〉) changed its pronunciation
to the sound [x] (‘jota’), which came to be spelled with the letter 〈j〉 in the 18th century across the board, except in words where
this sound came from an earlier 〈g〉, in which case it is spelled with that
sound (cf. Part I, Chapter 10).
In Old Spanish, quexar/queixar was primarily a
transitive verb with a variety of meanings, primarily ‘to afflict, affect’, a
sense that is today expressed mostly by the verb afligir or the derivate
aquejar (see below). But there were other senses of quexar in Old
Spanish, such as ‘to attack, pursue’, in a military context, ‘to urge, prompt,
put pressure’, ‘to trouble, harass’, and ‘to prevail upon’, ‘to overcome’, etc.
(see Malkiel 1945, p. 159). This multiplicity of meanings is one of the reasons
scholars have been confused as to the origin of this word. The current theory, as
we said, is that quexar comes from Lat. quăssāre (actually from a
Vulgar Latin derivate, quassiare). The change in meaning from Lat. quăssāre ‘to shake violently, shatter,
impair, disturb, etc.’ to the meaning quexar had Old Spanish, namely ‘to
afflict, affect, etc.’ is not an unreasonable one. However, we can see why some
might have come up with other options for the source of Old Spanish quexar.
As we said, quexar was typically transitive, as in Cuydados
muchos me quexan ‘Many problems afflict me’ (J. Ruiz, 14th century, DCECH).
It was occasionally used intransitively and then it meant something like ‘to be
afflicted’ (Modern Spanish: estar aquejado) or ‘to lament’, e.g. Se
lo ve quexar ‘One can see him (be) afflicted/lamenting’ (13th century, DCECH).
In the 14th century, the verb quexar stopped being used transitively,
however, and came to be used only pronominally (reflexively) and, thus,
intransitively.[2]
Note that in those days, reflexive quexarse did not mean ‘to complain’
like quejarse does today but, rather, the it meant the same thing as
intransitive quexar, namely ‘to be afflicted, upset, distressed’ (DCECH),
‘to show distress’ (Malkiel: ‘to cry, weep, wail, sob’). The meaning change of quexarse
from ‘be distressed’ to ‘complain’ is a reasonable, unsurprising one. The new
meaning can be found in writings as early as the beginning of the 14th century
(DCECH) and it is the normal meaning of the verb by the 15th century.
Let us look now at the speculation that Old Spanish (O.Sp.) quexar
is derived from a putative Vulgar Latin *quassiare and not from Lat. quăssāre. The reason is that we
would have expected an Old Spanish word derived by word-of-mouth transmission
from Lat. quăssāre to have resulted in *casar
[ka.ˈsaɾ], or perhaps even *cuasar
[ku̯a.ˈsaɾ], but not quexar [ke.ˈʃaɾ].
That is the reason that the unattested Vulgar Latin derived verb *quassiare
has been postulated. The i in this word represents a semi-vowel [i̯] sound that would explain
the change of the alveolar consonant [s] to the post-alveolar or pre-palatal [ʃ]. And this change itself
explains the rise of the vowel [a] to [e], for the low vowel [a] was typically
raised to [e] when next to a palatal consonant such as [ʃ]. The loss of the semivowel [u̯] after the consonant [k] is expected in Old Spanish
patrimonial words between [k] and a high vowel [i] or [e] (cf. Sp. que
[ke] and quien [ki̯en]),
but also before an unstressed [a], e.g. Sp. calidad < Lat. qualitatem,
so the e is not really needed to explain this loss. (For all these sound
changes, see Part I, Chapter 10.)
Interestingly, the existence of an unattested variant *quassiare
of Lat. quăssāre in Late Latin or
Vulgar Latin is corroborated by a word in another Romance variety, namely Old
French, whereas a cognate of this Spanish verb is attested as quaissier,
quesser and quasier in different dialects. In some dialects of
Old French, the cognate of this verb was quasser, a verb we mentioned
earlier as the source of Modern French casser ‘to break’. The variant
with the i in it, which caused the consonant to be palatalized, was the
one used in Anglo-Norman, the variety of Old French brought to England, which
resulted in the English loanword quash, that we shall discuss below.[3]
[1] Quoted from p. 142 of “The Etymology of Hispanic que(i)xar”, by
Yakov Malkiel, Language, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Jul.-Sep., 1945), pp. 142-183,
Published by: Linguistic Society of America.
Malkiel himself argued that O.Sp. que(i)xar,
which according to him originally meant ‘to oppress, to squeeze’, is derived
from the O.Sp. noun qu(i)xo ‘jaw’, which is not a popular theory today
and DCECH does not even mention it. Among the other theories of the origin of O.Sp. quexar, there is one that
says that it comes from a Vulgar *questare, a frequentative of querī ‘to complain’, but that has been dismissed as
a phonetically impossible derivation (DCECH). For more early theories on the
origin of O.Sp. quexar, see Malkiel’s 1945 paper or the entry quejar at
the DCECH.
The noun queixo ‘jaw’ that Malkiel postulated as
the source of quexar is patrimonially descended from Vulgar Latin capseum
‘box-like’, from capsa ‘box’ (source of Sp. caja ‘box’), cf. Sp. quijada
‘jaw, jawbone (of an animal)’, from Old Spanish quexada. From this noun queixo,
‘warriors of Christian Spain’ presumably derived the verb que(i)xar ‘to
press between the jaws’ and subsequently ‘to squeeze, to crush, to smash'’
between the 8th and the 10th century (op. cit. p. 180).
[2] As Malkiel tells us, ‘The ratio of frequency between quexar
and quexarse in narrative texts of the 13th century is 10:11; in the
early 14th century book Confisión del Amante (c. 1400) it changes to
0:18’ (op. cit., p. 158).
[3] Etymologists explain the palatal sound [ʃ] at the end of Eng. quash as being caused by the front (‘palatal’) vowel i in the French word, which was not there in Latin. The OED explains things the following way: ‘The usual modern form with final /ʃ/ reflects French forms with a palatalized sibilant (represented in spelling by ‑iss‑ or ‑ssi‑ ); such forms are especially frequent in Anglo-Norman, while in continental French they occur only in the far north (Picardy, Walloon) and east (Lorraine, Moselle, Switzerland). An unattested post-classical Latin etymon *quassiare ‘to crush, break, shatter’, variant (with insertion of vocalic glide) of classical Latin quassāre, has been posited to account for such forms in French (see Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch s.v. *quassiare), but it is possible that they arose by group analogy with other verbs also having palatalized forms’ (OED).
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