[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]
[Go to Part 1 of Words about sex and gender]
Lat. gĕnus
Both of
these cognates, Eng. gender ~ Sp. género, are loanwords from
Latin. As with the case of Sp. sexo, the Latin sourceword did not pass on
to Spanish by uninterrupted oral (patrimonial) transmission. The source was an
irregular, third declension neuter Latin noun whose nominative and accusative
singular forms were both gĕnus,
and its genitive singular form was gĕneris, which reveals that this irregular lexeme’s
full regular root was gĕner‑,
not gĕn‑,
as the nominative and accusative case wordforms would seem to indicate. Lat. gĕnus was a very polysemous
word whose primary sense was ‘birth, descent, origin’ and, more concretely, ‘a race,
stock, etc.’ (L&S), though it also had other meanings, such as ‘kind, type,
class, division, grouping’. This word is unrelated to similar sounding Latin
words, namely 4th declension neuter genū genūs
‘knee’ and 2nd declension masculine gener generī ‘son-in-law’, source of patrimonial
Sp. yerno ‘son-in-law’.
In Latin grammar,
the word gĕnus
referred to what today we call grammatical gender (Sp. género
grammatical), namely each of the grammatical groupings of nouns, adjectives
and pronouns based loosely on sex (or lack of sex), of which there were three
in Latin: masculine, feminine, and neuter, the same division found in Old
English and other Indo-European languages, since it was also found in these
languages unattested source language, Proto-Indo-European (cf. Part I, Chapter
3). English lost the gender distinction for nouns and adjectives altogether in the
Middle English period (c. 1150-1450), and the Latin neuter gender merged with
the masculine gender in the Romance languages, such as French and Spanish,
which resulted in the two genders these languages now have: masculine and
feminine, which apply to every noun and adjective in the language.
Lat. gĕnus
descends from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *ǵénh₁os ‘race, etc.’ (more on
this word’s meaning below). The root of this noun was in its origin verbal, *ǵenh₁-,
which meant ‘to produce, to beget, to give birth’. The Latin verb descendant
from this Proto-Indo-European verbal root is gignĕre ‘to create, engender;
to be born’ (the verb’s principal parts were gĭgno, gĭgnĕre,
gĕnŭi, gĕnĭtum). The stem gign‑ in this verb descends from
PIE *ǵíǵnh₁-, which was the reduplicated form of the present stem *ǵenh₁‑
that we just saw.[i]
From the same PIE root *ǵénh₁‑, we get Lat. gēns
‘Roman clan; tribe; nation; people’, whose accusative form was gentem (regular
stem: gent‑), the source of Sp. gente ‘people’. The source word
in Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed as *ǵénh₁tis, derived by means
of a suffix from the same verbal root *ǵenh₁-. Sp. gente is a
latinized (semi-learned) version of the patrimonial Old Spanish word yente,
which was mostly used in the plural then (cf. las yentes ‘the people’).
There are many Latin words that descend from this Proto-Indo-European
root by suffixation, such as gnāscī or nāscī ‘to be born’, the
ultimate source of Sp. nacer (same meaning), and gĕnĭus, source
of Eng. genius and Sp. genio.[1]
From the stem gĕner‑
of the noun gĕnus,
Latin produced the verb gĕnĕrāre ‘to beget, procreate, engender, produce,
create, etc.’ (L&S), source of learned Eng. generate and Sp. generar,
and, from this verb’s passive participle gĕnĕrātus ‘generated’, the noun
gĕnĕrātĭōn‑
‘a begetting, generating, generation’ (L&S), come Eng. generation
and Sp. generación. Other verbs were derived from Lat. gĕnĕrāre
by prefixation, such as Lat. regĕnĕrāre, source of Eng. regenerate
~ Sp. regenerar.
Other related words are Lat. gĕnitor ‘a begetter, father’
(genitive: gĕnitōris), source of Eng. genitor
~ Sp. genitor (and Sp. progenitor ‘ancestor; father or mother’);
Lat. genitālis
‘of procreation or birth’, source of learned Eng. genital ~ Sp. genital;
Lat. germen (gen.: germinis) ‘shoot, sprout, bud; germ, seed;
embryo, fetus’, source of Eng. germ ~ Sp. germen, ultimately from
Proto-Indo-European *ǵénh₁mn̥ ‘offspring, seed’; from this noun, comes the
adjective germānus/a
‘having the same father and mother; true’, source of Sp. hermano/a
‘brother/sister’; Lat. generālis
‘shared by all, general’, source of Eng. general ~ Sp. general;
and Lat. generōsus/a ‘well-born, well-bred, noble; generous, magnanimous;
etc.’, source of Eng. generous ~ Sp. generoso/a. The adjectives
Eng. benign ~ Sp. benigno/a, as well as their antonyms Eng. malign
~ Sp. maligno/a, also contain in their origin the root *ǵenh₁-.[ii]
We find cognates of Lat. genus in other Indo-European
languages, such as Ancient Greek γένος
(génos) ‘race, stock, kin; offspring, descendant; class, sort, kind; family,
nation’. English and Spanish have borrowed or created many words that contain
this Greek root, most of them in modern times, resulting in many cognates, such
as Eng. genealogy ~ Sp. genealogía, Eng. genesis ~ Sp. genesis,
Eng. genetics ~ Sp. genética, Eng. oxygen ~ Sp. oxígeno,
and words with the suffix Eng. ‑genic ~ Sp. ‑génico, such as Eng.
photogenic ~ Sp. fotogénico.
Another cognate of Lat. genus is the patrimonial
English word kin, as in next of kin, also found in derived words
such as akin, kind, kindred, and kinship. In Old
English, this word was written cynn and it was also quite polysemous
since it meant ‘kind, sort, rank, quality, family, generation, offspring, race,
people, sex, etc.’.
It seems that all of words derived from the PIE root *ǵénh₁‑
had three main meanings that go back to the source original root, namely ‘(1) race
or stock, (2) class or kind, (3) gender or sex’ (OED). The last of these senses
was found in the English cognate in Old English and early Middle English, but not
in Modern English. Curiously, however, the ‘sex’ meaning is the only sense
cognates of this word has in the also Germanic languages modern Dutch, Danish, and
Swedish (OED).
[1]
Ultimately derived from the Latin verb gnāscī, we have the noun nātiōn‑, source of Eng. nation
~ Sp. nación, the noun nātūra, source of Eng. nature and
(with an added suffix) Sp. naturaleza, and nātīvus, source of
Eng. native and Sp. nativo/a.
[ii] For more Latin words that
ultimate trace their source to the Proto-Indo-European root *ǵenh₁-, see
Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic
Languages, 2008, under gigno, ‑ere.
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