Let us look now at the verb aquejar ‘to afflict,
ail’, which was mentioned earlier. This verb was presumably derived from quexar
in Old Spanish by addition of the prefix a‑, which descends from either Latin
prefix ad‑ ‘to’ or ab‑ ‘off, from’. This a‑ was mostly
used in Old Spanish as a rather meaningless prefix that was added to adjectives
and nouns to form so-called parasynthetic verbs, e.g. amueblar ‘to
furnish’ from the noun mueble ‘piece of furniture’, or agrandar
‘to enlarge’ from the adjective grande ‘large’ (cf. Part I, Chapter 5). However,
this prefix was also on occasion added to verbs in Old Spanish to form mostly synonymous
variants of these verbs, some of which have disappeared from the language, but
others have remained to this day as dialectal variants with a meaning that is
more or less close to the meaning of the variants without the prefix a‑.
For example, from bajar ‘intrans. to go down; trans. to
lower’, the verb abajar was created, which is rare in the standard
language today but which is still found in dictionaries such as María Moliner’s,
where we learn that it is a non-standard (‘popular’) variant of transitive and
intransitive bajar. The DLE tells us that abajar is primarily
transitive, but that it can also be used as transitive and it adds that it has
a specialized meaning in veterinary science, namely ‘to cut down the hooves of
horses a great deal’.[1]
Another example is acallar, which is now a transitive verb meaning ‘to
silence, hush, drown out, mute’, which is related to intransitive callar
‘to be/keep quiet, shut up’. The verb acallar is now equivalent to hacer
callar, but originally it could be used intransitively as synonymous with callar.
The verb atestiguar ‘to testify’ could be seen as another example of
this phenomenon since it coexisted with testiguar in Old Spanish, which
is now obsolete. However, in this case both verbs are derived from a noun,
namely testigo ‘witness’, not necessarily from a verb. The same thing
can be said of the pair profetizar – aprofetizar ‘to prophesy’,
only the former of which is in use today (dictionaries do not even mention aprofetizar),
since they are both derived from the noun profeta ‘prophet’. But it is even
possible that the verb aquejar was not derived from the verb quejar
at all, but rather from the noun queja, which now means ‘complaint’, that
was derived from the verb quejar, as we will see in the next section.
So, presumably, aquejar started off as a variant of quejar,
but eventually their meanings changed, first a little and then more, as quejar
came to be used only as the pronominal verb quejarse, with a somewhat
different meaning from the one it had had a century earlier. DCEH mentions that
this verb is attested already in 1270, as aquexar, and that it has
maintained its etymological meaning, unlike quexar. It is not so clear,
however, that this verb has maintained its meaning so well through the
centuries. Note that of the five senses in María Moliner’s dictionary for aquejar,
four are said to be obsolete today, with the only sense in use today being ‘for
an illness or malady to affect someone’ (MM).[2]
And of the five senses given for this verb in the Academy’s DLE dictionary,
three are said to be obsolete (ant.). The two senses that are not
obsolete in the DLE are: (1) ‘to distress, afflict, fatigue’, and (2) ‘said of
a disease, a vice, a defect, etc.: to affect someone or something, to cause
them harm’ (DLE).[3]
The Diccionario panhispánico de dudas
(DPD) defines this verb’s single meaning as ‘to affect or cause harm/injury’,
without mentioning the fact that this verb is typically used with the sense of
maladies or illnesses causing the harm.[4]
Interestingly, there are conflicting opinions as to whether
the secondary complement of this verb (not the subject) is a direct object or
an indirect object. The Diccionario de dudas y dificultades de la lengua
española (DDDLE) tells us that Sp. aquejar works just like the verb gustar
and other verbs like it not only in that the subject typically follows the
verb, but also in that the person affected is coded as an indirect object, as
in aquejar un dolor A una parte del cuerpo ‘for pain to affect a
part of the body’. Thus, the third person pronoun to be used with aquejar
according to this dictionary is le(s), as in Le aqueja una enfermedad
crónica [un fuerte dolor de cabeza, una grave preocupación] ‘He ails from a
chronic illness [a strong headache, a serious worry]’ (María Moliner). Some
Spanish-English dictionaries agree with this, such as Advanced
Español-Inglés VOX, which gives the following example: Le aqueja una
enfermedad desconocida ‘He is suffering from an unknown illness’
(AEIV). The Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (DPD), on the other hand,
takes the position that the affected entity is a direct object, not an indirect
object, and thus the preposition a is not needed unless it is a personal
a, and the appropriate third person pronouns are lo(s)/la(s). Strangely
enough, however, the DPD also says that the ‘personal a’ is
typically used even if the object is not a person, a fact that would seem to
indicate that we are dealing with an indirect object and not a direct object.[5]
The Oxford Spanish-English Dictionary agrees with the analysis that the
object is a direct object, cf. the example Lo aqueja un fuerte dolor de
espalda ‘He is suffering from severe back pain’ (OSD). It would seem that
we are dealing here with a dialectal difference, which for some reason has gone
unacknowledged by the language authorities.
Go to part 12 (coming soon)
[1] The original says: ‘Cortar mucho del casco de las caballerías’ (DLE).
[2] The original says: ‘Afectar a ↘alguien un padecimiento o una
enfermedad’ (MM).
[3] The original says: ‘Acongojar, afligir, fatigar’, and ‘Dicho
de una enfermedad, de un vicio, de un defecto, etc.: Afectar a alguien o algo,
causarles daño’ (DLE).
[4] The original says: ‘Afectar o causar daño’ (DPD).
[5] The original says: ‘El
complemento directo de cosa puede ir opcionalmente precedido de a…,
siendo mayoritaria la presencia de la preposición: «Es muy fácil entender un
mal que aqueje al cuerpo» (Britton Siglo [Pan. 1995]); «Los
problemas que aquejan [...] el mundo musical de nuestro país» (Melo Notas
[Méx. 1990])’
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