Embarrassing pregnancies, Part 3: Sp. preñada and Eng. pregnant

[This entry is the third section ("Sp. preñada and Eng. pregnant (and Lat. praegnās and *praegnāre)") of Chapter 3 ("Embarrassing pregnancies") of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unusual Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

Sp. preñada and preñar

Going back to the topic of pregnancy, we must mention the words Eng. pregnant and Sp. preñada, which happen to have pretty much the same meaning, ‘Carrying developing offspring within the body’ (AHD). They are not used the same way, however, since whereas Eng. pregnant can be used for women and for (female) animals, Sp. preñada cannot (anymore) be used for women.

Note first, however, that at first sight we cannot say that these words are cognates in the sense used in this book, for although they share the same root (pregn‑/preñ‑ < Lat. pregn‑), their endings seem at first sight to be quite different. Words ending in ‑ant in English typically come from a Latin present participle words, whereas words in ‑ada in Spanish typically come from the Latin past/passive participle suffix ‑ata. Because the two words share the root/stem, we say that they are cognate (or paronyms), but we cannot say that they are necessarily cognates until we know more about their origin (for a discussion on cognates and paronyms, see Part I, Chapter 1).

Other than that, the main difference between these two words, as we said, is that the Spanish word preñada is typically only for animals, not typically for women. This did not use to be the case, however, and the modern words for ‘pregnant’ for women are modern euphemisms for an earlier preñada (for a discussion on euphemisms, see Part I, Chapter 6, §6.4.2).

Note, however, that in dialects of Spanish spoken in many rural areas, the word preñada is still used for women, a usage that is not found in standard Spanish. Using it for a woman nowadays in most contexts, however, sounds at best quaint and archaic, since for most ‘modern people’ the word preñada has been substituted in Spanish in recent centuries by euphemisms such as embarazada (see above), encinta (see below), and en estado (de buena esperanza). There are additional non-standard euphemisms, such as grávida, gestante, and gruesa. Notice that English too uses euphemisms and other colorful expressions for pregnant women, such as with child, expecting (or expectant), and in a family way. Two other colorful expressions to express the meaning of being pregnant are to be up the spout, and to have a bun in the oven. Another reason for not using preñada for a pregnant woman is its modern association with the verb preñar ‘to make pregnant’, as we will see below.

It turns out that these two words are indeed cognates in the sense used in this book, since they do have the same origin. It’s just that the Latin word they come from had two different variants. The words pregnant and preñada go back ultimately to a Latin adjective that is either praegnās or praegnans in the nominative singular form (for both masculine and feminine). Both of these forms are found in Latin and the one with the n is the earlier one, from with the n-less one is derived. In other words, there were two versions of this word, one with an n in the stem and one without it:

	Variant 1	Variant 2
Nominative singular	praegnās	praegnans
Genitive singular	praegnātis	praegnāntis
Accusative singular	praegnātem	praegnāntem

This adjective is formed with the prefix prae‑ ‘before’ (Lat. prae‑ was replaced by pre- in later times) and the root ‑gnā(n)t‑, though in the nominative case, the t is missing from the stem, as you can see. The root ‑gnā(n)t‑ is somehow related to the deponent verb gnāscī, or nāscī, ‘to be born’ (the source of Sp. nacer ‘to be born’.[1] In other words, the Latin word praegnā(n)s meant originally, according to its word parts, something like ‘(in a state of being) before birth’.

It would seem that Sp. preñada is probably related to Variant 1, for Latin ‑t‑ became ‑d‑ in Old Spanish between vowels (cf. Part I, Chapter 10), though the ‑a ending remains unexplained (see below). Likewise, it would seem that Eng. pregnant is probably related to Variant 2 of this word, the one with an ‑n‑ in it. In other words, the ending ‑ant of Eng. pregnant is not related to the suffix ‑ant associated with many adjectives and nouns derived from Latin first conjugation present participle forms, such as important, servant, expectant, or pleasant.

And, if this theory is correct, Sp. preñada does also not contain the participle suffix ‑ada from Lat. ‑ata. In other words, preñada would be derived from the accusative form praegnātem, of the adjective praegnās. The problem is that, given what we know about sound changes from Latin to Old Spanish, praegnātem should have given us Sp. preñad, not preñada, since all patrimonial Latin words that end in ‑ātem end in ‑ad in Modern Spanish, such as verdad ‘truth’ (from veritātem). This could be explained by the word having been turned feminine (for obvious reasons) and having changed the final ‑e to ‑a (see below).

However, there is the lingering issue that preñada has an  ending that is typical of a feminine past participle verb form, ‑ada, one that typically comes from the Latin passive participle ‑āta, and which often turns into adjectives (and nouns).  In other words, preñada can be interpreted (by a modern speaker who does not know any better) as an adjective derived from the verb preñar, which in Modern Spanish means ‘to impregnate, make pregnant’. The word preñada would then necessarily mean ‘impregnated, made pregnant’, not just ‘pregnant’ or ‘with child’, which was the original meaning which was the meaning of the original Latin adjective praegnās. And sure enough, the word preñada can be interpreted both ways (‘pregnant’ and ‘impregnated’) in modern Spanish.

However, there are good reasons to believe that preñada was not originally a past participle of a verb preñar, as it looks at first sight today. The first thing we should keep in mind that there does not seem to have been a verb *praegnāre in classical Latin, which would in theory have been the source of Sp. preñar, since such a verb is never attested in writing. On the other hand, there was a derived (prefixed) verb impraegnāre in Latin, the source of semi-false friends Eng. impregnate and Sp. impregnar, which is attested in Late Latin writing in (though not in Classical Latin). This Lat. impraegnāre seems to have been originally intransitive, meaning ‘to conceive, to become pregnant’, not transitive, meaning ‘to make pregnant’. However, the patrimonial Old Spanish verb form empreñar derived from Lat. impraegnāre may have come to be transitive in meaning and to mean ‘to make pregnant’.

Because of all this, eminent Spanish etymologist Corominas does not think that Sp. preñada was originally a participle form of the verb preñar. He thinks that, as we said earlier, it is derived from an unattested Vulgar Latin *pregnata, which substituted the original praegnate(m) by giving it the typical feminine ending ‑a, since this word was used only to refer to females. Corominas thinks that the verb preñar ‘to make someone pregnant’ is a back formation from the adjective preñada, and that it is relatively recent. (For more on the phenomenon of back formation, see Part I, Chapter 5, §5.7.3.)

Eng. pregnant

As for English pregnant /ˈpɹɛɡ.nənt/, this is a 16^th century borrowing from the Classical Latin adjective praegnantem ‘with child’, though it may have been mediated by a French version of this word, such as prégnant (this word prégnant is only used figuratively in Modern French and it is quite rare, though there is another word prégnant, as we shall see). This word replaced, and thus was a euphemism for, traditional English terms such as mid-bearne, literally ‘with child’. Soon thereafter, however, it became a taboo word itself, something that lasted until the mid-20^th century, when it became a polite word again. Among the euphemisms that replaced this word, we find anticipating, enceinte (from Fr. enceinte, cf. Sp. encinta), expecting, in a family way, and in a delicate (or interesting) condition. Slang words have also developed in the English-speaking world out of the word pregnant, such as preggers (1942) and preggo (1951).

We should note that English has a second word pregnant that, surprisingly, is not related to the other one. This second adjective pregnant means currently ‘meaningful, full of meaning’ and it is found in phrases such as a pregnant pause (= a pause full of meaning). Most people who use this word (not many, admittedly) probably think that this is just an quirky secondary meaning of the regular word pregnant. But this second word pregnant comes from Old French preignant, presumably the present participle of the verb preindre ‘press, squeeze, stamp, crush’, which ultimately comes from Lat. premere ‘to press’. English borrowed this word pregnant in the late 14^th century, even before it borrowed the other one, though it is quite rare in Modern English, other than in the phrase pregnant pause. In earlier times this adjective pregnant could be used to describe an argument, proof, evidence, reason, etc. and its meaning was ‘pressing, urgent, weighty; compelling, cogent, forcible, convincing; hence, clear, obvious’ (OED).

Finally, let us look at the noun pregnancy, which is obviously derived from the adjective pregnant. However, this noun does not descend from a Latin word, as one might have thought, something such as *pregnantia. One might have thought that was the case for there is a pattern in English morphology of Latinate words that might have made us think this way. The pattern is that words that end in ‑ant or ‑ent, which as we saw are almost invariably derived from Latin present participles, have a related derived noun that ends in ‑ancy or ‑ency, respectively. That is to say, English words in ‑ant, which alost invariably come from first conjugation Latin present participles (‑a‑nt‑), could be further derived by means of the noun ending ‑i‑(a) attached to the stem, which in participles ended in ‑nt‑. And Latin nouns ending ‑nt‑+‑i-a nouns have become English nouns in ‑cy, through the vagaries of sound change in French (from where these English words come). Thus, we have infant (< Lat. infant-em) and infancy (< Lat. infant-i-a; cf. Sp. infante and infancia), vacant and vacancy (cf. Sp. vacante and (rare) vacancia), expectant and expectancy, and president and presidency (cf. Sp. presidente ~ presidencia), for example.

However, remember we said that Eng. pregnant was not originally a present participle in Latin, so it would have never been possible to add the ending ‑ia to it in Latin, giving us *praegnantia, a word that did not exist because could not have been derived that way.[2] However, some English speaker who did not know this decided to derive the noun pregnancy out of the adjective pregnant nonetheless and so, the word pregnancy was born in the 16th century.

The way you say pregnancy in Spanish is embarazo, a back-formation or zero-formation (conversion) derived from the verb embarazar (see above) (cf. Part I, Chapter 5, §5.7). Another, much less common synonym for the noun ‘pregnancy’ is preñado, a masculine noun related to the feminine adjective preñada.

Eng. impregnate ~ Sp. impregnar

Before leaving the words Eng. pregnant ~ Sp. preñada, let us go back to Eng. impregnate and Sp. empreñar/impregnar. We said earlier that according to Corominas, Late Latin impregnare was primarily intransitive and meant ‘to conceive, to become pregnant’. It seems, however, that this verb also came to be used transitively, that is, with the meaning ‘to make pregnant’. That would mean that Spanish transitive preñar ‘to make pregnant’ could have come in as a variant of transitive empreñar. Notice that Sp. empreñar is very rare in modern in Standard Spanish, though it is still found dialectally.

Interestingly, this very same verb impraegnāre has made a comeback in both English and Spanish as learned words. In other words, the verb was borrowed from written Latin at a later point by both English and Spanish, giving us the cognates Eng. impregnate ~ Sp. impregnar. English impregnate is a 17^th century loan that follows a borrowing of the word through French as impregn in the 16^th century. Eng. impregnate comes from the past participle of the Latin verb, namely impraegnātus, hence the different ending from the Spanish infinitive, which comes from the Latin infinitive impraegnāre.

However, Eng. impregnate and Sp. impregnar are actually false friends of sorts or, as we have been calling the phenomenon in this book, semi-false friends. English impregnate has the original sense of the word, namely ‘to impregnate, make pregnant’, but it has also acquired a secondary sense (use) in addition of the original one, though it is not as well known as the original one. This second sense is ‘[to] soak or saturate with a substance’ (COED), or ‘imbued or saturated with something; having some active ingredient diffused through it’ (OED), as in the phrase impregnated wood, wood that has been treated with a preservative. In Spanish, on the other hand, the original sense has totally disappeared and has been replaced by the one we just mentioned as secondary for English. In other words, Sp. impregnar can never mean ‘to impregnate’, but rather ‘to soak a solid with some active ingredient’.

Let us end this section by mentioning an English word related to the word impregnate, namely the adjective impregnable ‘not able to be captured by attack : very strong’ (MWALD), as in an impregnable building. This word was borrowed from Old French impregnable, at around the same time the 16^th century as the word impregn was borrowed, the one that preceded the more Latinate version of this loanword, namely impregnate. (Notice that if this adjective was derived from this verb, it would be *impregnatable, which is not a word.) Eng. impregnable does not have a cognate in Spanish. Its main equivalent in Spanish is inexpugnable, which is not a related word.

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[1] The principal parts of this deponent verb meaning ‘to be born’ are: (g)nāscor, (g)nāscī, (g)nātus sum. For more on deponent verbs, see Part I, Chapter 8, §8.4.3.4. The initial g was lost by Classical Latin times, but it can be observed in words derived from this one by means of prefixes, as in the adjective/noun cognatus (fem. cognata), from co‑ (< con‑) ‘with, together’ +‎ (g)nātus ‘born’, which meant primarily ‘related by blood, kindred’. This is, of course, the source of the words Eng. cognate and Sp. cognado, both of them learned words (loanwords from written Latin). Spanish also has a patrimonial descendants of this word, namely cuñado and cuñada, that means ‘brother in law’ and ‘sister in law’. By the way, the root of this verb goes back to Proto-Indo-European root *gene- ‘give birth, beget’, found in many New Latin words such as gene and genetics.

[2] Actually, the wordform praegnantia did exist in Latin, though not with a derivation typically associated with the endin ‑antia. It was the neuter plural nominative and accusative wordform of the adjective praegnāns.

Embarrassing pregnancies, Part 2: Spanish vergüenza and pena

[This entry is an excerpt from the second section of Chapter 3 of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An (Unorthodox) Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

Sp. vergüenza

If embarazar does not mean ‘to embarrass’ and embarazado/a does not mean ‘embarrassed’, then how do we express these meanings in Spanish? The most widespread Spanish equivalents for these words in standard Spanish are avergonzar for the verb embarrass and avergonzado/a for the adjective embarrassed. However, Spanish prefers to use neither the adjective nor the verb, but rather the related noun vergüenza /beɾ.ˈɡu̯en.θa/ to express these meanings, along with the verbs dar, tener, or sentir. Thus, what a student who is too shy to speak up in class would probably say something one of the following where an English student might say ‘I am embarrassed (by it)’:

• Me da vergüenza, lit. ‘It gives me embarrassment’, i.e. ‘It embarrasses me’
• Tengo vergüenza, lit. ‘I have embarrassment’
• Siento vergüenza, lit. ‘I feel embarrassment’

Either one of these three ways is more common than Estoy avergonzado/a, with the adjective, or Me avergüenza, with the verb. These last two sentences are quite acceptable Spanish sentences, but their meaning is quite a bit stronger than ‘I am embarrassed’, since they express more a sense of ‘shame’ than ‘embarrassment’, though the two concepts are somehow related. Thus, the sentence Estoy avergonzado/a can be best translated as I am ashamed and the sentence Me avergüenza as It makes me feel ashamed.

The patrimonial noun vergüenza comes from Lat. vĕrēcŭndĭa ‘shamefacedness, shame’, ‘bashfulness, shyness’, and even ‘respect’, that is, ‘a natural and positive feeling of shame (face loss), by whatever cause it is produced’. This noun was derived from the adjective vĕrēcŭndus (fem. vĕrēcŭnda, stem: vĕrēcund‑) and the suffix ‑ia which created abstract nouns typically out of adjectives, as in this case (cf. Part I, Chapters 5 and 8). The adjective vĕrēcundus meant ‘feeling shame (at any thing good or bad); bashful, shy, etc.’.[1] This adjective was itself derived from the second-conjugation deponent verb verērī ‘to respect, revere, fear’, a verb that is cognate with the English adjective aware, since they both descend from the same Proto-Indo-European root. (The principal parts of this Latin verb are vereor, verērī, veritus sum.)

The reason for these differences in meaning of vergüenza and the words derived from it is that vergüenza is a polysemous word, namely one that has more than one meaning (sense), as often happens in language (cf. Part I, Chapter 6). Most English-Spanish dictionaries tell us that the noun vergüenza has three major senses, one of which is sometimes divided into two subsenses:

• Embarrassment/shyness, with two subsenses
• Subsense 1: Shyness
• Meaning: ‘bashfulness’, ‘shyness’, i.e. ‘feeling bad about doing something which might make you lose face or feel humiliation’
• Synonyms: timidez, corte(dad), apocamiento
• Examples: Me da vergüenza hablar en clase or Tengo vergüenza de hablar en clase ‘I’m embarrassed about speaking in class’
•  Subsense 2: Embarrassment
• Meaning:  ‘embarrassment’, i.e. ‘feeling bad about something that happens to you that might make you lose face or feel humiliation’
• Synonyms: turbación, sonrojo, sensación de ridículo, rubor, bochorno
• Examples: Me dio vergüenza cuando me caí or Pasé vergüenza cuando me caí ‘I was embarrassed when I fell down’
• Sense of shame
• Synonyms: sentido del decoro, deshonor, sentimiento de dignidad,
• Example: No tienes vergüenza ‘You have no (sense of) shame’, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself’
• Something disgraceful (that causes or should cause embarrassment or shame)
• Synonyms: escándalo, motivo de oprobio
• Example: Estos precios son una vergüenza ‘These prices are outrageous, disgraceful’

The first sense is the one that is the one that compares to Eng. embarrassment and embarrassed. Notice that this sense has two subsenses. The first one refers to the uneasy feeling about doing something that may cause embarrassment. Eng. shyness and (the somewhat archaic) bashfulness are probably the best equivalents of this sense of the noun vergüenza when this noun is used as an abstract noun. When it is used to express how a person feels at a particular moment, as in No tengas vergüenza ‘Don’t be shy/embarrassed’, the equivalent in English can be the adjective embarrassed (as well as shy or bashful, of course).

The noun timidez is a synonym of this sense of vergüenza, a word that translates as bashfulness, shyness. The noun timidez is derived from the adjective tímido/a ‘shy’ by means of the suffix -ez that creates abstract nouns out of adjectives in Spanish, after removing the inflexional ending ‑o/a (tímid-ez, cf. Part I, Chapter 5). The adjective tímido/a, of course, is cognate of Eng. timid, and it is a synonym of the Spanish adjective vergonzoso/a that we mentioned earlier. Sp. tímido also translates Eng. shy, which is much more common than its synonym timid. Both Eng. timid and Sp. tímido are learned loanwords from the Latin adjective tĭmĭdus/tĭmĭda ‘fearful, afraid, faint-hearted, cowardly, timid’ (English borrowed it in the mid-16th century and Spanish in the late 15th century). This Latin adjective was derived from the root tĭm‑ of the verb tĭmēre ‘to fear, be afraid, be fearful, be apprehensive, dread’, the source of patrimonial Sp. temer, with the same meaning. Another pair of cognates derived from the same root are Eng. intimidate and Sp. intimidar.[2]

The second subsense of the first sense of the noun vergüenza is the one closest to the English noun embarrassment (synonym: ‘anxiety, worry’) and thus to the adjective embarrassed when the noun vergüenza is used to describe how a person is feeling. It refers to the uneasy feeling about something that has happened that is seen as being embarrassing or anxiety provoking. Note that the expression dar vergüenza can be used with both subsenses, whereas pasar vergüenza can only be used with the second subsense. The expression tener vergüenza, on the other hand, can only be used with the first one.

The second major sense of vergüenza is ‘shame’, a sense much stronger than ‘embarrassment’, but one that shares with it the sense of ‘loss of face’, i.e. ‘loss of respectability in front of others’.  The word vergüenza with this ‘strong’ sense of ‘shame’ is used in a number of expressions. One of them is tener vergüenza, which we just saw could be used with the sense of the first subsense of the first sense. The noun vergüenza can also have the strong sense of ‘shame’ in the expression dar vergüenza, if used in the right context. Thus, for instance, the sentence Debería darte vergüenza can probably best be translated (typically) as You should be ashamed and not You should be embarrassed.

Spanish	English
vergüenza	embarrassment	small face-loss
	shame	big face-loss

As we saw earlier, the expression dar vergüenza can also be used to translate the English verb to embarrass or to make (one) feel embarrassed/embarrassment, as in Me dio vergüenza lo que hizo mi hijo ‘What my son did made me feel embarrassed’. Another way to express this verb’s transitive meaning is hacer pasar vergüenza ‘to make (someone) feel embarrassment’.

Words related to vergüenza

There are a number of words derived from Sp. vergüenza. In addition to dar vergüenza and hacer pasar vergüenza, there is also a transitive verb avergonzar (a‑vergonz‑ar; o > ue). Like the noun, it can have both the strong and the weak senses, namely ‘cause shame’ and ‘cause embarrassment’.  We find the strong sense in a sentence such as in Mi novia me avergonzó delante de mis padres ‘My fiancée embarrassed/shamed me in front of my parents’. This verb is most commonly used reflexively, that is, as intransitive avergonzarse (de) ‘to feel shame/embarrassment (about)’, as in Me avergüenzo de lo que he hecho ‘I am ashamed/embarrassed of/for what I’ve done’. Sometimes, one of the two senses comes through more clearly, as in Me avergüenzo de ti ‘I’m ashamed of you’. From the past participle of the verb avergonzar we get the adjective avergonzado/a ‘ashamed’ or ‘embarrassed’ (a‑vergonz‑ado/a).

The Latin adjective vĕrēcŭndus that we saw in the previous section was not passed on to Spanish as a patrimonial word and it was not borrowed from Latin later either. Rather, Spanish developed the adjectives from the noun vergüenza. One is vergonzoso/a (vergonz-os-o/a), which has two senses: (1) ‘causing shame, shameful, disgraceful, etc.’, as in un asunto vergonzoso ‘a shameful matter’ or Tus palabras fueron vergonzosas ‘Your words were shameful’. The other sense, not surprisingly, is  ‘shy, bashful’, as in un niño vergonzoso ‘a shy boy’ or Soy vergonzoso ‘I’m shy’ (equivalent to Tengo vergüenza).

The other adjective related to vergüenza is actually derived from the past participle of a verb derived from the noun vergüenza, namely avergonzar (a-vergonz-ar), whose two main senses are ‘to cause shame; to cause embarrassment’. This transitive verb is often used as an intransitive in its reflexive form avergonzarse, also with two meanings: ‘to be or become ashamed’ and ‘to be or become embarrassed’. The participle of this verb is avergonzado/a, which can be used as an adjective, also meaning either ‘ashamed’ or ‘embarrassed’.

The word sinvergüenza, formed from the preposition sin ‘without’ and the noun vergüenza  can be used as an adjective with the strong sense meaning something like ‘shameless’, as in No seas sinvergüenza ‘Don’t be shameless’. It can also be used as a noun and, as such, it translates as ‘shameless (person)’ or ‘scoundrel’, e.g. Juan es un sinvergüenza ‘Juan is a scoundrel’. Sometimes, however, the word is used tongue-in-cheek in contexts in which the word is not quite as strong, especially when employed often to refer to children who misbehave. Then the adjective is best translated as cheeky or rascally and the noun as rascal or brat.

Since the preposition sin ‘without’ is not used commonly as a prefix in Spanish, the word sinvergüenza is obviously derived from the phrase sin vergüenza, lit. ‘without shame’, as in una persona sin vergüenza or un tipo sin vergüenza ‘a person without shame’.[3]  If we drop the noun, we get the noun phrase with the same meaning, namely un(a) sin vergüenza, in which the prepositional phrase sin vergüenza ‘without shame’ has been nominalized (become a noun), namely sinvergüenza ‘shameless’ or ‘shameless person’.

Derived from sinvergüenza is the noun sinvergonzonería that means ‘shameful act, impudence, shamelessness’ or, more properly, ‘the quality of being a sinvergüenza’ or ‘an act typical of a sinvergüenza’. It is formed from the colloquial augmentative of sinvergüenza, namely sinvergonzón, and the ending ‑er‑ía (sin‑vergonz‑on‑er‑ía).

3. Sp. pena

The word vergüenza is not the only way to express the meaning of ‘embarrassment’ in Spanish. Perhaps because this word has two major senses (‘embarrassment’ and ‘shame’), in some dialects, the word pena is used to express the weak sense instead of vergüenza. According to the DLE, in Central America, the Caribbean islands, Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela, the word pena is used instead of vergüenza for the sense of ‘bashfulness’ or ‘embarrassment’. In some countries, namely Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama, the word pena is also equivalent to the related sense of the word pudor ‘modesty, sense of decency, decorum, bashfulness’, so that in these dialects the meaning of pena extends to embarrassment about the display of one’s body and behavior that is considered immodest.

In these countries, the noun pena is used with this sense of bashfulness with the verbs tener ‘to have’, sentir ‘to feel’, or dar ‘to give’, as in Tengo pena, Siento pena, or Me da pena translate in these dialects as ‘I’m embarrassed’ (equivalent to Me da vergüenza in other dialects, such as those found in Spain). The very common phrase Don’t be embarrassed translates in these dialects as No tengas pena.

The expressions that we have just seen would be interpreted very different in other countries, such as Spain, for instance, since there the word pena does not have this meaning. In those other countries, pena translates primarily as pity (or as shame, but only in the phrase What a shame!, equivalent to What a pity!). In the plural, penas typically means ‘sorrows’ and in legal terminology pena can mean ‘penalty’. The word pena comes from Lat. poena ‘penalty, punishment’, which was a loan from Gk. ποινή ‎(poinḗ) ‘penalty, fine, blood money’.

The English noun pain is a cognate of Sp. pena, but they are false friends since their senses are different. Eng. pain was borrowed from French in the late 13th century with the sense of ‘penalty’. Since judicial penalties in those days involved the infliction of pain (torture), it is no surprise that the word pain came to acquire the meaning it currently has in English, though not in Spanish.

The main sense of Eng. pain translates into Spanish as dolor. Do note that dolor is also an English word, albeit a rare one. It means ‘grief, sorrow’. They come from Lat. dolor (acc. dolōr-em), which meant primarily ‘pain, ache’, but also ‘anguish, grief, sorrow’ and ‘indignation, anger’.

In Spanish, pena can still mean ‘punishment’, as it did in Latin, so that pena de muerte means ‘death penalty’, but that is not its main meaning nowadays. (Eng. penalty is derived from the same root; the expression pain of death is still used as equivalent to dealth penalty.) As we said, the main sense of pena in standard Spanish is ‘grief, sorrow, pity’. It is used very often in sentences such as Juan me da pena ‘I feel sorry for Juan’ and ¡Qué pena! ‘What a pity’, and Siento pena ‘I feel sorry’. It is obviously from this sense of ‘grief, sorrow, pity’ that the ‘embarrassment’ sense was derived for the word pena in certain collocations and in certain countries (though not all).

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[1] In Old Spanish, the noun vergüença, the precursor of Mod.Sp. vergüenza, alternated with a synonym vergüeña (cognate of Catalan vergonya). Corominas thinks that vergüeña is the true patrimonial word whereas vergüenza comes from a semi-learned Medieval pronunciation vergundia, which later became vergunzia (/beɾ.ɡun.ʣ̪i̯a/), verguinza (/beɾ.ɡui̯n.ʣ̪a/), and eventually vergüenza. French lost this Latin word and its meaning is expressed in French by the noun honte /ˈɔ̃t/ ‘shame’, from Frankish *haunitha ‘disdain, scorn, ridicule’. By the way, Eng. shame is a patrimonial word that descends from O.Eng. scamu (also attested as scomu, sceamu, sceomu), which also meant ‘shame’. The plural of the noun vergüenza, namely vergüenzas, is also a euphemism for ‘private parts’.

[2] Derived from the verb tĭmēre Latin had the noun tĭmor (accusative: tĭmōrem), meaning ‘fear, dread’, which is the source of the Spanish noun temor, with the same meaning. Another word derived, in Spanish, from this noun is atemorizar ‘to frighten, scare; to terrorize’. From the verb temer, Spanish has also derived the adjective temeroso/a ‘fearful’.

[3] Another words formed on this pattern is sintecho, lit. ‘without roof’, which is one way to refer to a ‘homeless person’.

Embarrassing Pregnancies, Part 1: Sp. embarazada and Eng. embarrassed

[This entry comes from Section 1 of Chapter 3 of Part II of the open textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Introduction to Spanish Linguistics]

Introduction

 

The Spanish word embarazada and the English word embarrassed are cognates in the sense used in this book, for they derive from a common source. However, they are a classic example of false friends, since the two words have such seemingly different meanings. Spanish embarazada, pronounced /em.ba.ɾa.ˈsa.da/ or /em.ba.ɾa.ˈθa.da/,[1] depending on the dialect, means ‘pregnant’ in English. On the other hand, English embarrassed /ɪm.ˈbæ.ɹəst/ means ‘feeling awkward, self-conscious, or ashamed’ and it translates primarily as avergonzado/a in Spanish.

Perhaps another reason that these words are such a canonical example of false friends is that it is not uncommon for students of Spanish to feel self-conscious about speaking up in class and they may sometimes want to express that they are embarrassed, and if they use the adjective embarazada (or embarazado), as in Estoy embarazada ‘I am pregnant’, this is bound to raise some eyebrows and to be quite an embarrassing experience. (Of course, for a male student to say Estoy embarazado would be even more embarrassing.) At any rate, the story of how these words came to have their meanings is quite interesting and can teach us something about the vagaries of meaning change and word borrowing in general. Some aspects of these words’ histories are a bit muddled and unclear, but we know enough to make sense of the big picture.

These two words look very much like they should be ‘useful cognates’ (those that look alike and have the same meaning), but they are not. However, if we go back far enough we find that not only is there a historical connection between the two words, since they derive from the same source, but also to some extent there is a connection between the meanings of the modern-day words. Therefore, as you can imagine, the story of how these words’ meanings have changed is quite interesting.

According to the most credible sources, the story of these words starts in an Iberian Romance language, either in Portuguese or in its neighbor and closely related language, Leonese, which is still spoken in Spain and which exerted some influence on the Spanish language, which originally was known only as Castilian. Leonese is spoken in the area between where Galician-Portuguese is spoken and Castile, where Spanish was born (cf. Part I, Chapter 9, §9.8.3).

Some dictionaries put the origin of English embarrass in Italian imbarrazzo, derived from barra ‘bar’, but that is most likely a mistake, though this word may have had a role to play in the story of how the word got from one language to another. We know that the verb embarazar, and its participle embarazado/a, do not appear in writing in Spanish until the 15^th century, which is rather late. We also think that Spanish must have been borrowed it from Leonese or Portuguese, where it already existed, sometime before that. After that, we find it in French and Italian since the 16^th century and it is pretty clear that these languages got the word from Spanish. Finally, we do know for sure that English got the word embarrass from French embarrasser in the 17^th century.
 

Sp. embarazada and embarazar

 

The modern Spanish verb embarazar comes from an earlier Old Spanish embaraçar, from an identical word in Leonese or Portuguese. The letter 〈ç〉 symbolized the sound [ʦ̪], which centuries later changed to [s] or [θ] in Spanish, after which the spelling was changed to 〈z〉 (cf. Part I, Chapter 7, §7.9.11, and Chapter 10, §10.5.3). The verb embaraçar was derived from the noun baraça in Leonese and Portuguese, which can be translated into English as ‘(hunting) rope, cord, snare, trap’. This word is not of Latin origin and it is thought it may have a pre-Romanic origin, Celtic in particular, since eastern Spain was inhabited by Celts before the Romans arrived. Thus, the original meaning of the verb embaraçar was ‘to tie down with a rope; snare, trap’. Therefore, the original meaning of embarazada—and embarazado, of course—was ‘tied down, snared, trapped’.

baraça	baraç+a	‘(hunting) rope, cord, snare, trap’
embaraçar	en+baraç+ar	‘to snare, trap, snarl up, entangle’
embaraçado/a	en+baraç+ad+o/a	‘trapped, ensnared, entangled’

Table 149: Original words derived from the root baraç‑

A second figurative sense of the verb embaraçar developed even before the verb was borrowed into Spanish and the original, literal meaning disappeared. These second meaning is something like ‘to hinder, obstruct, block’. This is one of the main meanings the word embaraçar still has in modern Portuguese, though other related senses have cropped up (including supposedly the sense ‘to embarrass’, cf. Table 150). It is also the same main meaning that French embarrass has and, finally, it also the same meaning that embarrass had when it first appeared in English, though the meaning has changed, as we shall see. 

embaraçar ( modern Portuguese)
transitive verb:	(impedir) to hinder, (complicar) to complicate, (encabular) to embarrass, (confundir) to confuse, (obstruir) to block
reflexive verb (embaraçar-se)	to become embarrassed

Table 150: Meanings of modern Portuguese embaraçar
(including several transitive senses and one intransitive (reflexive) sense. In parentheses are the sense headings in Portuguese and next to it is the English translation (Collins))

For a verb that meant ‘to trap, entangle, etc.’ to come to meaning something less literal and more general, such as ‘to hinder, obstruct’ is not at all rare (see Part I, Chapter 3, §3.6).

Although some dictionaries tell us that Spanish embarazar and embarazado/a can still have this ‘hinder’ meaning, the truth is that probably no speaker of Spanish would use these words in that sense nowadays and we can say that that sense is archaic, if not outright obsolete. The ‘hinder’ meaning has been replaced in Spanish by a new meaning for the words embarazar and embarazada (there is no longer embarazado), which now primarily mean, respectively, ‘to get someone pregnant’ (‘to knock up’ in slang) and ‘pregnant’. This new meaning has taken over the old one.

The original meaning of the word, ‘to hinder’, can be expressed in Modern Spanish by verbs such as impedir, estorbar, and dificultar. The original sense can still be seen in the derived verb desembarazarse (de) ‘to rid oneself (of), to get rid (of)’ (des+en+baraz+ar+se), as in Me desembaracé de mis perseguidores ‘I shook off my pursuers’. 

There is a third sense of the stem embaraz‑ in Spanish, one that is related to the second one. This sense can be found in the derived Spanish adjective embarazoso/a ‘awkward, troublesome, bothersome, annoying’ (en+baraz+os+o/a), as in una situación embarazosa ‘an awkward situation’. This ‘bother, annoy’ sense is thought to have developed in French and to have come into Spanish from French after the root was borrowed by French from Spanish.

It is not too difficult to imagine how the ‘pregnancy’ sense of these words could have come changed from the earlier sense ‘to hinder, obstruct’. The use of for this purpose must have started as a euphemism (cf. Part I, Chapter 6, §6.4.2). Although we do not have evidence for this, the ‘pregnancy’ sense of the word embaraçada could very have started as a euphemism. The new meaning became so prevalent and to render the original sense obsolete. As for when exactly this change in the meaning of the word took place, it is not clear, but it is likely it happened after the word was borrowed by French in the 16^th century.

As we said earlier, embarazar in Modern Spanish means ‘to make pregnant’, but it is likely that the ‘pregnancy’ sense was acquired first by the participle/adjective embarazada, and only later by the verb embarazar. Remember that the adjective embarazada is first and foremost the feminine past participle of the verb embarazar. Thus from the verb embarazar (en+baraz+ar) (‘to make pregnant’ in Modern Spanish), the participle embarazada is derived by means of the suffix ‑ad‑ and the feminine ‑a ending (en+baraz+ad+a). 

Note that Spanish embarazada is both an adjective and a past participle. Remember that Spanish, even more so than English, can turn past participles into adjectives quite easily (cf. Part I, Chapter 5). Thus, for instance, Sp. abierto can be an adjective meaning ‘open’, but it is derived from the homonymous past participle abierto ‘opened’ of the verb abrir ‘to open’. And the Spanish adjective callado ‘silent, quiet’ (as in Juan es muy callado ‘Juan is very quiet/a very quiet person’ or in Juan está muy callado ‘Juan is very silent’), comes from the homonymous past participle callado, ‘gone silent’ or ‘made to be silent’, of the verb callar ‘to shut up, be silent’. 

Thus, we can see that in Modern Spanish, embarazada too can be both an adjective and a past participle. The adjective embarazada just means ‘pregnant’, as in Marta está embarazada ‘Marta is pregnant’.  But the homonymous past participle embarazada, from the verb embarazar ‘to make pregnant’, means ‘made pregnant’ or, in English slang, ‘knocked up’, as in Marta fue embarazada ‘Marta was made pregnant’.
 

Eng. embarrass

 
The French verb embarrasser, from which English embarrass was borrowed as early as the 17^th century has had several senses through the ages, some of which have at one point or another been used in English writing, as any dictionary will tell us, though they are not necessarily known to but a few speakers of Modern English. The Petit Robert French dictionary gives us two main senses for modern-day, transitive (non-reflexive) embarrasser, namely (1) to block, clutter, encumber and (2) to put in a difficult situation, to perplex, to make ill-at-ease (the Grand Robert French dictionary has many more senses, some of which are archaic).

The current meaning of the English verb embarrass clearly ranges from something identical to the second French sense (‘awkward’) to a sense derived from it involving shame and bashfulness (‘ashamed’). According to the OED this sense came into the existing English word embarrass in the 19^th century. The OED describes this sense as ‘to make (a person) feel awkward or ashamed, especially by one’s speech or actions’. The COED dictionary describes the meaning as ‘to cause to feel awkward, self-conscious, or ashamed’ (COED). Any other sense this word may have had seems to be obsolete in current English. In other words, for most speakers this is not only the main meaning of the word, but rather its only meaning.

Moving on to words that are derived from the verb embarrass, we have the derived form embarrassed, which can be a past tense verb form (as in She embarrassed me), a past participle (as in She has embarrassed me), or an adjective (as in She is embarrassed) where no agency is involved. This is the original word that we started the chapter speaking about, as in the sentence I am embarrassed. All these words have Spanish equivalents derived from the noun vergüenza, as we will see in the next section.

Another derived word is the noun embarrassment, which is somewhat stronger than the adjective and can be defined as ‘a feeling of self-consciousness, shame, or awkwardness’ (COED). There is also an expression in English, embarrassment of riches, which means something like ‘an overabundance of choices’, or ‘to be flustered/confused from so many good things to choose from’. The expression comes from the title of a well-known 18^th century French play L’embarras des richesses, with the same meaning. Probably the most common way to express this in Spanish would be demasiado donde elegir (ESD-GU).

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[1] The sound [θ] is the sound of the letter 〈z〉, as in zapato ‘shoe’, and the letter 〈c〉 before 〈e〉 or 〈i〉, as in cereza ‘cherry’, in most of Spain. Most other speakers of Spanish (all of those speakers outside Spain, or more than 90% of all Spanish speakers) pronounce these letters the same as the letter 〈s〉, namely as [s]. From now on we will not give the two possible pronunciations for words containing these letters, but only the [θ] sound. To convert these transcriptions to those of most speakers, replace [θ] with [s]. Do not be concerned for now about the difference between square brackets [] and slanted lines // to enclose transcriptions. This is explained in Part I, Chapter 7.