From Latin Iŏvĭs to Spanish jueves
The word jueves
‘Thursday’ comes from Latin Iŏvĭs
‘of Jupiter’, written 〈IOVIS〉 in Latin. More specifically,
it comes from the phrase diēs
Iŏvĭs ‘day of Jupiter’
from which the word diēs
has been removed. The word Iŏvĭs
may look rather different from the word jueves,
if we look at the spelling, but even more so if we look at the sounds involved.
However, the sound changes we find here are all the regular ones we expect to
find in a patrimonial Spanish word, one that was transmitted by word of mouth
uninterruptedly from Classical Latin, to Vulgar (popular) Latin, to Romance, to
Old Spanish (Castilian), and to Modern Spanish. There are no sporadic or
analogical sound changes here, as in the case of the word miércoles, only regular ones.
i
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ŏ
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v
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ĭ
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s
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/ ˈjɔ.wɪs/
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j
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ue
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v
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e
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s
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/ˈxu̯e.bes/
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Let us look at each of the letters in turn, starting
with the initial i. We find that this
is one of the rare cases in which this letter did not represent a full,
syllabic vowel, but rather a consonant sound derived from that vowel sound, namely
[j], the sound of the letter 〈y〉 in English when it is a
consonant, as in you and yell. In some words, this vowel became a
(semi-)consonant before another vowel in Latin. This semi-consonantal [j] sound
changed to [ʒ] in
Romance, and it is the sound it had in Old Spanish (it still has that sound in
French, for instance). However, by the 17th century, this sound had mutated to
the sound that the letter 〈j〉 currently has in Spanish,
represented by the symbol [x] in the International Phonetic Alphabet. (In
English, the letter 〈j〉 typically represents the sound [ʤ],
as in jar or jello. In some dialects of Spanish, the letter 〈j〉 is pronounced
[h] as in English hose. All this is
explained in Part I, Chapter 7, in detail.)
The changes in the other vowels are even easier to explain. Latin
short ŏ always became ue
in Old Spanish patrimonial words if it
was stressed, and short ĭ always changed to e, without exception. On the other hand,
in non-patrimonial words, that is, words that were borrowed from written Latin
at a later date, also known as learned
words, Latin short ŏ is always o in Spanish and short ĭ also stays i.[1]
Finally, the letter 〈v〉 might not seem to require an
explanation, since it remains unchanged, but we should not forget that its
pronunciation in Spanish is very different from the pronunciation it had in
Latin. The letter 〈v〉 in this context was
pronounced [w] (that is, like the English letter 〈w〉).
This sound changed to [β]
in Old Spanish, a sound much like the [b] sound but without fully closing the
lips. Eventually this sound became a variant of the [b] sound in Spanish. We
represent the sound than combines both variants /b/ (cf. Part I, Chapter 7). In
Old French, Latin 〈v〉, pronounced [w], came to be
pronounced [v] (as in vain) and that
is why we write this sound with the letter 〈v〉
in English as well.
The name for Thursday in other Romance languages (other than
Portuguese, which is quinta-feira) is
also derived from the same Latin phrase diēs
Iŏvĭs, as for
example in Catalan dijous, where as
we can see, the word diēs
is not lost and the two words are blended into one. The phrase diēs Iŏvĭs could also be expressed
in reverse order in Latin, as Iŏvĭs
dies, and this is the source of French jeudi.
Other Romance languages follow one of these patterns. Standard Italian has giovedì, which follows the French
pattern. Galician has xoves, which
shows a loss of the word diēs,
just like Spanish. In Sicilian too, we find the same thing, since the word for
Thursday in this language is juvi.
Jupiter
You may have been surprised to learn that Lat. Iŏvĭs meant ‘of
Jupiter’, for this word does not look very much like the word Jupiter. It turns out the nominative
case wordform that meant ‘Jupiter’ in Latin, which was Iŭppĭtĕr, does not
look very much like the genitive case wordform Iŏvĭs either. Let us look at
this word in some detail, since its story is quite interesting.
Jupiter was the main
god of the Romans, their Sky God, the father and ruler of gods and men. The name
for Jupiter, the god and, thus, the planet,
in Latin was Iŭppĭtĕr
in the nominative case or wordform of this word, written 〈IVPPITER〉, pronounced [ˈjʊp.pɪ.tɛr].
(The nominative case of a noun is the form of the noun that is used when
it functions as the subject of a sentence, for instance.) Originally, however, the word was
Iūpiter, with a long ū
and a single p. From this nominative
case comes English Jupiter /ˈʤu.pɪ.təɹ/
and Spanish Jupiter /ˈxu.pi.t̪eɾ/, words that are used for both the Roman god and for the
planet named after him.
So why is the genitive or possessive case wordform, the one
meaning ‘of Jupiter’, so different from the nominative? Since Iŭppĭtĕr
has more letters, one might think that it is Iŏvĭs that is odd, and that
it has been shortened somehow. Actually, it is the other way around. It is not the
genitive Iŏvis, but rather
the nominative Iŭppĭtĕr,
that is strange, since all the other cases for this word besides the nominative
singular follow the same pattern as the genitive, with the root iŏv‑. We also know that the
original name of this god in the nominative was at one time, early on, Iŏve. The expression ‘By
Jove!’, though dated, is still found in most English dictionaries. It first
appears in English in the 16th century and it is used ‘used to express surprise
or to emphasize a statement’ (OALD).
The reason that Iove
become Iuppiter is that the name of the
god was so often uttered together with the word for father next to it, as in Iove
Pater, meaning ‘Father Jove’ or ‘Sky Father’,
that eventually the two words fused and gave us the new wordform Iuppiter as the nominative and vocative
cases of this name. (The vocative case is the form of a noun ‘used in addressing
or invoking a person or thing’ (COED).
i
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ŏ
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v
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ĕ
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p
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a
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t
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e
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r
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i
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v
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p
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i
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t
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e
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r
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As we can see, when these two words blended, two
short vowels were lost. The letter 〈v〉, changed from representing
the semivowel [w] sound to the vowel [u] sound, but that was to be expected,
since in Latin this letter represented both sounds, which one depending on
whether there was a vowel following. The other thing that might seem strange is
that the vowel a in the word pater changed to i in the compound (Iup)piter.
This type of sound change was not uncommon, however, in early Latin, for vowels
mutated when they came to be unstressed in compounds (cf. Part I, Chapter 8,
§8.3.3).
Interestingly, adding the word for father to the word for God
is not limited to Latin among the Indo-European languages, so this is a very
old and well-attested tradition. In the Umbrian language, which is a sister
language of Latin, we find 𐌉𐌖𐌐𐌀𐌕𐌄𐌓
(iupater); in Sanskrit, another daughter language of Proto-Indo-European, we
find द्यौष्पितृ (dyauṣ-pitṛ);
and in Ancient Greek, we find Ζεῦ πάτερ
(Zeû páter).
Latin Iove, the
early equivalent of the word Iuppiter,
has given us a curious pair of cognates: English jovial and Spanish jovial,
which mean ‘cheerful and friendly’ (COED). They come from Late Lat. ioviālis ‘pertaining or
related to Jove/Jupiter’, an adjective derived with the adjectival suffix ‑āl‑
(iov‑i‑āl‑is). It seems
that being born under the sign of the planet Jupiter brought upon people positive
dispositions and friendly personalities. English jovial /’ʤoʊ̯.vɪə̯l/ came into English in the late
16th century from French, perhaps ultimately from Italian. Sp. jovial /xo.ˈbi̯al/ is first attested in
the early 17th century (Lope de Vega).
Eng. Thursday
The name of the day Thursday
/ˈθɜɹz.ˌden̯/ is also a calque of the Latin name for this day. It
comes from Old English Þunresdæg (among other spellings). The Þunres in Þunresdæg is the genitive case wordform of Þunor, the name of the god of thunder. Since
Jupiter was the god of sky and thunder (in addition to being, unlike Þunor, the king of the gods) in Roman
mythology, the early Germanic people chose this god for the name of this day
when they calqued the Latin names for the days of the week. The word þunor itself meant primarily ‘thunder, thunderclap’,
but it was also the name of the deification of this natural phenomenon. The Anglo-Saxon
god Þunor is equivalent to Thor in Norse (North Germanic) mythology,
cf. Old Norse Þórr (Swedish Tor).
Eng. thunder is primarily
a noun, though it is also used as a verb. It is not known how the word thunder, which comes from O.Eng. Þunor, got its intrusive ‑d‑ in later times, but a few other
Germanic languages have it too in their cognates of this word. This word has
been reconstructed as containing the Proto-Indo-European root *ton (variant of *(s)ten‑), meaning ‘to drone, groan, thunder, etc.’.
The root in the word thunder
(thun‑) can also be found in the
Latin verb tŏnāre
‘to thunder’ (tŏn‑). The
descendant of this verb in Spanish is tronar,
with an intrusive ‑r‑, which goes
back to Roman times and perhaps comes by the influence of the ‑r‑ in the word tŏnītrus ‘thunderclap’. The Spanish noun meaning ‘thunder’, trueno, also contains this root, as does
the word tronido ‘thunderclap’, derived
from Lat. tŏnītrus by metathesis of the ‑r‑.
The Latin verb dētŏnāre
was derived from tŏnāre
was. It meant ‘to release thunder, to roar out’. This verb was borrowed in
the 18th century by English as detonate.
Actually, the noun detonation was
borrowed first, in the 17th century. Spanish borrowed it too, as detonar, with the same meaning. It is
likely that the word was borrowed from Latin first by French and then calqued
into English and Spanish.
Excursus: the Proto-Indo-European root dyew‑
The Sky God of the Indo-Europeans
Just like Jupiter was the Sky God of the Romans, Zeus was
the equivalent Sky God of the Helenes (Greeks). It turns out that Lat. Iŏve (Jupiter) and Gk. Ζεύς
(Zeús) are cognate words and that the word for the Sky God goes all the way to
their ancestor language Proto-Indo-European Sky God, which has been
reconstructed as *dyḗws (gen. *diwés). This word has also given us the
names of deities in other daughter languages, such as Sanskrit द्यु (dyú), Hittite 𒅆𒍑 (sius), and
Old English Tīw (as in Tuesday which originally meant ‘Tiw’s
day’). This word has an interesting story which well deserves an aside here.
The word for the Sky God in many Indo-European languages goes
back to the PIE root *dyew- found in
a noun meaning ‘sky, heavens’ and in a verb meaning ‘to shine’. Derived from
this root is the word reconstructed as *dyḗws
that has given the names of the Indo-European Sky God in many ancient
languages.
Sp. día (and the unrelated Eng. day)
Another word that is derived from the same
Proto-Indo-European root *dyew- and
from the same Proto-Indo-European word *dyḗws
is Lat. diēs ‘day’, which as we have
seen was part of the name of the days of the week in Latin. The Latin reflex of
this PIE word should have been *diūs,
and indeed we find this word in two fossilized Latin phrases. But *diūs changed to diēs presumably by analogy with the accusative wordform for this
word, diem, which had an e instead of a u. This fifth declension noun could be declined as a feminine noun
when the day is personified as a goddess instead of a god, from which comes the
version dia of this word in Latin.
Because the plural of dies was also dies, the feminine form dia came to be
used as the singular form of the word in Vulgar Latin and it is from this version
of the noun that Spanish gets its word día
‘day’, which ends in ‑a but,
curiously, is masculine.
Even more curiously, the English word day, though it looks similar to Sp. día, is not a cognate, for it does not descend from the same PIE root,
but rather from *dʰegʷʰ-, meaning ‘to
burn’ (cf. Old English dæġ and Proto-Germanic
*dagaz). In other words, Eng. day and Sp. día are false cognates, to the extent that they look alike, since although
they are not real cognates, since they do not have the same source. On the
other hand, they are cognates in the sense used in the language classroom, since
the two words do look alike and do have the same meaning (cf. Part I, Chapter
1, §1.3).
Sp. dios and diosa and Eng. diva ~ Sp. diva
The Spanish word dios
‘god’ (feminine diosa ‘goddess’) is related
to PIE *dyḗws as well, since they
share the same root. Sp. dios comes from
Latin dĕus /’de.ʊs/
(dĕ-us), meaning ‘god, deity’,
which comes from an earlier (Old Latin) deivos,
which comes from PIE *deywós ‘sky-dweller,
celestial one, god’, which also comes from the PIE root *dyew- ‘sky’ by the addition of a suffix (it is what is called an
o-stem derivate from that root). English god
is not related to this word, since it comes from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰutós ‘invoked (one)’, but English does
have some words derived from this Latin root, as we shall see.
Actually, Classical Latin had two variants for the
root meaning ‘god’, dĕ‑
and dīv‑, which
were originally one. We may be dealing with two dialectal variants. As we saw,
the Old Latin word was deivos ‘god’
in the nominative, singular, masculine wordform, with deiva ‘goddess’ being the feminine. The regular root was deiv‑. In Late Old Latin, this wordform
changed to dēvos (root: dēv‑). But then the root dēv‑ changed in two
different ways in circumstances that are not clear. In some contexts, perhaps
before back vowels, dēv‑
changed to dē‑, losing
the v, which resulted in the word dĕus ‘god’ we just saw, with
a feminine dĕa. In a different
context, dēv‑ changed
to dīv‑,
resulting in a word like dīva
‘goddess’, as well as other derived words.
Proto-Indo-European
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deyw
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os
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Old Latin
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deiv
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os
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Late Old Latin
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dēv
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os
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Pre-Classical
Latin
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dĕ
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os
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dīv
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a
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There was also an adjective derived from the root dīv‑ without a derivational
suffix, which meant ‘of or belonging to a deity; divine, godlike’. Its
masculine form was dīvus
and its feminine one, diva, just like
the noun that meant ‘goddess’ (the alternate forms dīus and dīa,
without a v, are also attested). It seems
that from that masculine dīvus
a noun was eventually derived also meaning ‘god’ and which is thus a synonym of
Lat. dēus.
As we said, Sp. dios
is said to come from Lat. dĕus, not from Lat. dī(v)us. Presumably after having first been dieos, for remember Latin stressed ĕ always became ie in Old
Spanish. This word is also unusual in that it comes from the nominative/vocative
case of the Latin word, not the accusative, which was dĕum. The accusative and would have produced Sp. dio, which is attested in Old Spanish, but which was much less
common and was eventually replaced with dios.
This was, no doubt, because this word was used more frequently as a subject
(nominative) and in exclamations (vocative).[2] In
Old Spanish, the stress was on the i
and the word had two syllables /ˈdi.os/. Eventually, the two vowels joined into
a diphthong: /ˈdi̯os/.
As we
saw, the feminine word for ‘goddess’ in Latin was dīva. Because in the Christian religion, which took
over the Roman Empire in the fourth century, there were no goddesses, for the
only god was conceived of as being masculine, this word was lost. In the 19th century, this Latin word was
borrowed by both English and Spanish, through Italian, to refer to ‘a famous female
singer of operatic or popular music’ (COED). Another word for an operatic diva,
especially in Spanish, is prima dona, an Italian phrase meaning literally
‘first lady’.
Other Latin words derived from the roots dĕ‑ and dīv‑
There are a few pairs of English-Spanish cognates
that are derived from the Latin word for god. English deity and its Spanish cognate deidad
are learned words that come from Latin deitātem
(accusative form of deitās), a word derived
from this same root and meaning originally ‘divine nature’. A closely related
pair of words are Eng. divinity ~ Sp.
divinidad. This noun was derived from
the adjective divīnus
‘divine’ which has given us Eng. divine
~ Sp. divino/a.
div
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īn
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us
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div
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īn
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itāt
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em
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de
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itāt
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em
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Let us start by looking at the Latin adjective dīvīnus ‘divine, of a god’, feminine dīvīna, from which come the English adjective
divine /dɪ.ˈvaɪ̯n/ and its Spanish cognate
divino /d̪i.ˈbi.no/, fem. divina.
These words have now acquired a second and more common sense as ‘excellent’ or ‘delightful’,
but the original meaning of the word had more to do with god than goodness. Latin
dīvīnus ‘divine; foreseeing’, is the Latin
adjective derived from the root dīv‑
of dīvus, itself an adjective meaning
‘divine, of god’, and the derivational suffix ‑īn‑ used to
form first and second declension adjectives (dīv‑īn‑us, dīv‑īn‑a).
Besides the adjective divine,
English also has a (fancy) verb to divine, which means to ‘discover by guesswork
or intuition’ or to ‘have supernatural or magical insight into (the future)’ (COED),
and which is related to the second sense of Latin dīvīnus, namely ‘foreseeing’. From this adjective, a few other
words were derived. First of all is the noun dīvīnus (no change), which meant ‘prophet, diviner, someone who can
see the future’. From this word comes Sp. adivino
‘fortune-teller, seer, diviner’, which was earlier divino. From the adjective dīvīnus
also comes the Latin verb dīvīnāre
‘to foresee, foretell, prophesy, guess’. From this verb comes the English
verb to divine, from Middle French deviner, as well as the Spanish verb adivinar ‘to guess; to forecast, foretell;
to divine’ (with the semantically vacuous prefix a- of Spanish parasynthetic verbs). Among the most common related collocations
for this verb are adivinar el futuro
‘fortune telling’ and adivinar el pensamiento
‘mind reading’. A word derived from this verb in Spanish is and adivinanza ‘riddle, puzzle’.
The cognate nouns Eng. divinity
~ Sp. divinidad come from Lat. dīvīnĭtas (accusative: dīvīnĭtātem) is derived from the
adjective dīvīnus (dīv‑īn‑ĭ‑tāt‑em).
Lat. dīvīnĭtas meant
‘divine quality, divine nature, godhood’, but also ‘the power of divining,
divination’ (see above). Eng. divinity
entered the language in the early 14th century with the meaning ‘study of
divine matters’, equivalent to theology.[3]
That meaning translates into Spanish as teología
only, not divinidad. Eng. divinity was a loanword from Old French,
where divinité is already attested in
the 12th century. By the end of the century, it could also mean ‘quality of
being divine’ (e.g. the divinity of Jesus)
as well as ‘divine being, god’. Sp. divinidad
is already attested in the 13th century (Berceo) and it has the last two
meanings we just saw for the Eng. divinity.
Perhaps because Lat. dīvīnitās
had a secondary pagan sense related to fortune-telling, in the 5th century, Augustine
of Hippo (Saint Augustine) coined the Latin deitas
from the root dĕ‑ of dĕus ‘god’ (dĕ-ĭ-tat-em) as
a calque of dīvīnitās which only had
the sense ‘divine quality, divine nature’. This word has given us Eng. deity and Sp. deidad. Eng. deity /ˈdi.ɪ.ti/
or /ˈdeɪ̯.ɪ.ti/ can mean ‘divine status, quality, or nature’ (COED), but it can
also be used to refer to particular divine beings (‘god or goddess (especially
in a polytheistic religion’, COED). English borrowed this word in the early 14th
century from Old French deité
(Mod.Fr. déité) with the meaning
‘divine nature’ and by the end of the century it could also mean ‘a god’. Sp. deidad /d̪ei̯ˈd̪ad̪/ first appeared in writing
in the late 15th century and it has the same two senses. Since Fr. déité is attested already in the 12th
century, it is quite possible that Spanish got it through French as well.
Sp. adiós
The Spanish word adiós
‘goodbye’ is another word derived from the same Proto-Indo-European root, since
it is derived from the word dios. In
remains the primary formal word for leave-taking in Spanish, equivalent to Eng.
goodbye, though in some countries it is
now perhaps less common than chao, from
Italian ciao ‘bye’. As we said, this word
is related to the word dios ‘god’. The
same is true of its cognates French adieu,
Italian addio, Portuguese adeus, and Catalan adéu. The story of this word is also quite interesting.
The word adiós is a
shortened version of the Old Spanish phrase a
Dios seas or, in the plural, a
Dios seades (should this expression still exist in modern Spanish, the plural
would have become a Dios seáis).
These phrases do not make much sense in modern Spanish. In the modern language,
they would mean literally something like ‘may you be to God’. However, that is because
seas and seades, which are now forms of the present subjunctive of ser ‘to be’, originally were forms of the
Latin verb sedēre ‘to sit, settle, remain,
stay, hang fast, hold on’ (from the Proto-Indo-European root *sed- and a historical cognate of English
sit).
Early Romance had three copula verbs: sedēre ‘to sit, remain, stay, etc.’, esse ‘to be’, and stāre ‘to
stand’. (A copula is ‘a type of verb, of which the most common is be, which joins the subject of the verb
with a complement, [that is, a] word that describes the subject)’, CALD.) From stāre we get Spanish estar ‘to be (located or in a state)’, which
has become more and more common in the last 1,000 years. The other two, esse and sedēre, merged into Spanish ser,
which explains in part why this verb’s forms are so irregular, since some come from
Latin esse and some from Latin sedēre.[4]
Thus, the Old Spanish phrase a dios seas
is equivalent to the Latin phrase ad deum sedeas,
which meant ‘Stay next to God’.
By the way, just like etymologically the Spanish word adiós contains the root for the word for
god in this language, dios, so too the
English word goodbye contains the word
god in English. The word goodbye is a contraction of a larger phrase
God be with you, a phrase that got progressively shorter
though time. The progression went something like this: God be wi’ you
> God bwy yee > Godbwye > Godby. The god‑ part in
the resulting word godby was changed at
a later time to good‑ by analogy with
other greetings which start with the morpheme good, such as good morning, good day, and good night.
[GO TO PART 6]
[GO TO PART 6]
[1] This is one sure sign to distinguish
patrimonial and learned words. Thus, for example, Lat. signa (plural of signum)
has given us patrimonial Sp. seña,
whereas Lat. signum (sing. of signa) has given us Sp. signo. Notice that the Latin short ĭ became e
in the patrimonial word, but not in the learned one. We can also see a change
in the consonants, since Lat. gn
changed to Sp. ñ in patrimonial
words, but not in learned ones.
[2] It seems that Old Spanish dios
could also be used as a plural in addition to singular, as in los dios ‘the gods’, a form commonly
attested in the 13th century. For this reason, Jews in Hispania called their
god (Jehova) Dio, to emphasize that
there was only one. Actually, this word was typically preceded by the article: el Dio. The analogical plural dioses ‘gods’ was created later, around
the 15th century. The feminine diosa
‘goddess’ was also created in the 15th century by adding the feminine ending ‑a to dios
(earlier forms deessa and diosesa are also attested).
[3] The word theology is of Greek
origin. It contains the root the‑ (of
θεός theos)
‘god’ which is not related to Lat. dĕ‑
(of dĕus ‘god’). Other words derived from this Greek
root are Eng. atheist ≈ Sp ateo,
Eng. polytheism ~ Sp. politeísmo.
[4] Sp. estar has expanded its
range of uses in the last millennium and it is used in modern Spanish in
contexts in which even a thousand years ago ser
would have been used.
