Personal names, Part 1B: Given names

[This entry is an excerpt from the chapter "Personal Names" of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.] 

This is Part 1B. Go to Part 1A

Given names

Introduction

Two-part personal names, such as those consisting of a first or given name and a family name, are common throughout the modern world in general and in the Spanish- and English-speaking worlds in particular. The use of two-part personal names is not universal, however. Also, there are major differences as to how they are implemented. We will see, for instance, that there are some major differences in how naming conventions work in the English-speaking and the Spanish-speaking worlds.

First of all, all people have a given name, also known as a first name or personal name. Another term for this name in the Christian tradition in English was Christian name, since such names typically had to come from a set of names approved by the Church and derived from the Bible or from saints’ names and it was given to the child at the time of baptism.

In Spanish, the first name is still known primarily as nombre de pila, or ‘baptismal name’. This name is derived from the word pila, which refers to the stone container for holy water used in baptism. This noun comes from Lat. pīla, meaning ‘mortar, vessel in which things are pounded’ and, related to that meaning, ‘washbasin, sink’. The word pila is still used in some dialects of Spanish with the meaning ‘sink, basin’, though it sounds archaic in most dialects. The word pila is used in modern Spanish to refer to small-size batteries (containers of electricity), such as those for watches or flashlights, as opposed to large batteries such as those in a car, which are called baterías. (In some dialects of Spanish, however, both are called baterías.)

There was another word pīla in Latin, which may have been cognate with the former, but which had a very different meaning, namely ‘pillar’ or ‘pier’. Perhaps to avoid the confusion, this second word pīla was changed to *pilāre, meaning ‘pillar’, in Medieval Latin or Vulgar Latin, which is the source of Eng. pillar and Sp. pilar. The second pīla did not disappear, however, and it ended up as Sp. pila and its cognate Eng. pile, both meaning ‘pile, heap’. English borrowed the word pile from French in the early 15th century. Spanish may have borrowed this word from Catalan (cf. Corominas).

Middle names in English

It was not uncommon for people to have more than one given name in the past, in order to honor different ancestors. In the modern English-speaking world, this custom has settled into most people having one optional second given name, called middle name, in addition to their main (first) name. In the Hispanic world, the tradition of giving multiple names to a child at the time of baptism and in birth certificates is not dead, but for official purposes, people only have one single given name. Some such given names may be compounded names, however, as we shall see.

In the English-speaking world, the additional, secondary given name has been known since the 19th century as a middle name.[i] As we said, the middle name is a remnant of the multiple (secondary and optional) given names of earlier times. Middle names are not required and people usually have at most one single middle name. Only royalty and other aristocracy nowadays have more than two such names.[ii]

In North America, the middle name is often reduced to an initial and not used at all for most purposes. In the United States, a middle name is not required and some people only have a middle initial, which does not stand for any name, as in the name of the 33rd president of the United States, Harry S. Truman.[iii] This middle initial is only used nowadays (optionally) in official documents and formal situations. Some people turn a mother’s last name into a child’s middle name, as in John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK).[iv] Others turn a maiden family name into a middle name upon adopting a husband’s last name.

Compound first names in Spanish

In the Spanish-speaking world, there are no middle names in official names in the same sense as in the English-speaking world. Some people may have multiple given (first) names given to them at birth, but for purposes of identification, only one is used. Spanish names, however, sometimes look like they contain a middle name at first sight. That is because Spanish often uses compound first names, such as José Luis, Juan Carlos, or María Elena. These names may look like a combination of first and middle names to an English speaker, but that is not what they are.

Compound first names are different from given names that consist of a first name and a middle name in that the two parts cannot be split and are thus pronounced as single words and, as such, they contain a single stressed syllable. Take the woman’s name María Elena, for example. It is not pronounced [ma.ˈɾi.a.e.ˈle.na], two words with seven syllables, two of which are stressed, but rather [ma.ɾi̯ae̯.ˈle.na], one word with four syllables and a single stressed syllable.[1]

In earlier times, following Catholic tradition, such compound names were typically formed with the name María, in deference to the Virgin Mary, along with another name. In the case of men’s names, the name Maria is added after the other name, e.g. Jose María, as in the name of the former president of Spain, José María Aznar.[2]

In the case of female names, María is typically the first part of a compound name that includes some quality of the Virgin Mary, e.g. María de la Caridad ‘Mary of Charity’ or a place in which the Virgin Mary supposedly made an appeared. In these cases, women are typically known by the second part of the name, in this case Caridad ‘Charity’, though their official name may include the María part. Needless to say, such names are not the norm any longer in most Spanish-speaking countries, but they were in earlier times and they are still found. We will look at some of these names in detail in section §44.2.1 below.

Go to Part 2

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[1] This single phonetic word has an i that is a semivowel ([i̯]), not a full vowel ([i]), since it is not stressed and thus forms a diphthong with the adjacent vowel. It also has a (normally) reduced e given that it is part of the same word (see Part I, Chapter 7).

[2] In Spain, a hypocoristic or pet name for men having such compound names may include the María part shorted to Mari, as in Jose Mari. Another hypocoristic for Jose María in Spain is Chema, a child-speak hypocorism.

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[i] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_name

[ii] We can see this in the names of current English royals: Queen Elizabeth II: Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; Prince of Wales: Charles Philip Arthur George; Princess Anne: Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise; Prince Andrew: Andrew Albert Christian Edward; Prince William: William Arthur Philip Louis; and Prince Harry: Henry Charles Albert David.

[iii] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman

[iv] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy

The roots PED- and POD-, Part 1: English foot and Spanish pie

[This entry is the first section ("English foot and Spanish pie") of Chapter 14 ("Pedestrian & pie: the roots PED- and POD-") of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

In this chapter, we are going to look at Spanish and English words that contain some version of a root that means ‘foot’. The English word foot and the Spanish word pie do not look or sound alike at all, but they are patrimonial cognates. This means that they are patrimonial words in their respective language, not loanwords, and that they go back to the same word in the language that is the ancestor to both languages, namely in Proto-Indo-European. We do not have any records of this language that was spoken over 5,000 years ago, but linguists have established its existence by comparing daughter languages derived from it. And the word for ‘foot’ was transmitted orally for thousands of years all the way to the present time in each of these languages. The connection is not so surprising once we realize that linguists have established that Proto-Indo-European p and d mutated into Germanic f and t, respectively (see Part I, Chapter 3, §3.6.5).

The English word foot /ˈfʊt/, plural feet /ˈfit/, is a native, Germanic word, the root of which was fōt /ˈfoːt/ in Proto-Germanic, the language that English, German, and other European languages come from. The Spanish word pie /ˈpi̯e/, plural pies /ˈpi̯es/ (it was piedes until the 13th century), is a native word too, one which goes back to the Latin root pĕd- /ˈped/. This word had an irregular nominative case form, namely pēs, but its accusative case form was pĕdem, and that is the form that Sp. pie derives from.

Both of these words go back to the same Proto-Indo-European root *pōd- ‘foot’. Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of English, changed the Proto-Indo-European consonants p and d to f and t, respectively), and Latin, the ancestor of Spanish, changed the vowel o to e. Other than that, foot and pie are (what linguists call) modern reflexes of the same original word in two different daughter languages.

Of course, if you didn’t know about those sound changes, you would have never guessed that these words are cognates, both in the sense of the word cognate used in this book (words derived from the same original source word) and in the sense of the word cognate used in linguistics (words derived from the same original source word that are not loanwords). Obviously, however, these two words are not cognates in the sense of the word used in language study (words that look alike and have the same meaning).

Proto-Indo-European pod-
Germanic fōt	Latin ped-
English foot (pl. feet)	Spanish pie

How we get from the Proto-Indo-European word to the English and the Spanish ones is easy to explain by regular sound-change rules that have been well known for over a century. So, as we said, in the Germanic branch of daughter languages, Proto-Indo-European p changed to f and d changed to t, both changes predicted by Grimm’s Law (see, Part I, §3.6.5).

The relationship between the singular and the plural of the English word (foot-feet) is also explained by a regular phenomenon known as i-mutation, umlaut, or metaphony, by which a back vowel, in this case the /ʊ/ in the singular word foot, becomes fronted to /i/ in anticipation of a similar sound in the suffix (cf. Part I, Chapter 7). This is a sound mutation that took place in many Germanic languages around 1,500 years ago.

The phenomenon of i-mutation or i-umlaut in Old English originally resulted in the change of vowels, such as the one we see here, when the sound in the following syllable was /i/ or /j/, as in the plural suffix ‑iz and the noun suffix ‑ith (that derived nouns from adjectives, e.g. filth < foul).[i] Although some of the vowel changes that took place have been reversed over the centuries by other regularizing processes, we still find reflexes of this change in singular-plural pairs such as foot-feet /ˈfʊt ˈfit/, mouse-mice /ˈmaʊ̯s ˈmaɪ̯s/ (pronounced /ˈmus ˈmis/ until about 500 years ago), and man-men /ˈmæn ˈmɛn/.

As we said earlier, Spanish pie is derived from the accusative form of Latin pēs, namely pĕdem. In this word the final -m was lost first, very early on, giving us pede. Then the stressed ĕ became the diphthong ie [i̯e], cf. piede. This is what happened to the short vowel ĕ in Latin as it morphed into Spanish if it was stressed. Then, the d was lost between vowels as it typically did, giving us *piee. Finally the resulting ee were simplified to a single e (pie), which is also an expected development. The changes are summarized thus:

Latin pĕdem > pede > piede > piee > Mod. Spanish pie

The Latin word pēs evolved differently in other Romance languages:

• Mod. French pied (Old French pié): the d, which is not pronounced, was added in recent times to the spelling of the word to make it look more like its Latin source word
• Portuguese pé (Old Port. pee): in Portugues, Latin short ĕ did not become a diphthong
• Catalan peu (a variant of Old Provençal pe)
• Italian piede: here the ĕ became a diphthong, but the d was not lost

English foot and Spanish pie are not the only patrimonial cognates that refer to body parts, though there aren’t very many of them. We find a few other such cognates, having to do with body parts. Sometimes, such pairs are not full cognates (sharing the root and all affixes), but they at least share the word’s root in the original source word. All of those pairs of cognates look very different from each other at first sight in the modern languages, since they split from the original source word thousands of years ago and the sounds in these words have mutated independently of each other (though not their meaning, in this case). The main such cognate words are the following:

• Eng. tongue ~ Sp. lengua are also cognates (it was dingua in Old Latin; cf. Chapter 16).
• Eng. tear ~ Sp. lágrima (from Latin lācrima, which comes from an earlier dacruma),
• Eng. tooth ~ Sp. diente (from Latin dent‑)
• Eng. ear ~ Sp. oreja (which comes from a diminutive of the Latin root aur‑)
• Eng. eye (from Old English ēaġe) ~ Sp. ojo (from Latin ocul‑)
• Eng. heart ~ Sp. corazón (from a word derived from Latin cord‑)
• Eng. nose ~ nariz (derived from Latin nār‑is, from nās-us, with rhotacism of the s)

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[i] Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut#I-mutation_in_Old_English

Infectious diseases, Part 1b: Synonyms of Eng. disease and Sp. enfermedad

[This entry is an excerpt from the chapter "Words about infectious diseases" of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

Synonyms of Eng. disease and Sp. enfermedad

Synonyms of Eng. disease

Eng. disease has two main synonyms, sickness and illness, which are not exactly identical, though they are often used interchangeably. All three words translate into Spanish as enfermedad, however.

English	Spanish
disease	enfermedad
sickness
illness

The word disease is the most objective of the three and thus the one typically used in medicine. It can be defined as ‘a pathological condition of a part, organ, or system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms’ (AHD). The word illness, on the other hand, refers to what can be the same thing but from a patient’s perspective. Note that a person may have a disease without feeling ill, and vice versa. Another difference in usage between disease and illness is that the word disease is used preferably for cases that are more life threatening or that require serious treatment.

The noun illness [ˈɪɫ.nəs] is derived from the adjective ill [ˈɪɫ], whose main meaning is ‘not in full health; unwell’ (COED), by adding the native, English (Germanic) suffix ‑ness that attaches itself to adjectives and creates nouns ‘denoting a state or condition’ (COED), e.g. deafness (< deaf), eagerness (< eager), etc. (The equivalent Latinate suffix in English is ‑(i)ty, e.g. stupidity, liberty, a cognate of Sp. ‑(i)dad.) The adjective and noun ill, first attested around 1200, is actually a loan from Old Norse and it originally meant something closer to ‘evil’ (‘morally evil; wicked, iniquitous, depraved, vicious, immoral, blameworthy, reprehensible’, said of persons and of actions, OED).[1] And when the noun illness was first attested around the year 1500, it meant ‘bad moral quality, condition, or character; wickedness, depravity; evil conduct; badness’ (OED), a meaning that is now obsolete.

Also sporting the suffix ‑ness, is the noun sickness [ˈsɪk.nəs], which derives from a native English adjective sick [ˈsɪk]. The same dictionary defines illness as ‘poor health resulting from disease of body or mind; sickness’, as well as ‘a disease’, and sickness as ‘the condition of being sick; illness’, as well as ‘a particular type of illness or disease’. As we can see, the two definitions are rather circular. The noun sickness is attested as early as the 10th century in English with pretty much its current meaning. As for the the adjective/noun sick, it is already attested in the 9th century, spelled séoc in Old English, and ultimately from Proto-Germanic *seukaz ‘sick’.

The word ill is used today primarily as a predicative adjective, equivalent to sick, as in to be ill, or as an adverb, equivalent to ‘in an ill manner, badly’ (OED), as in to speak ill. It is also found as a modifier (attributive) in set phrases such as ill health and ill temper, but notice that ill cannot always be used attributively and thus we do not say *an ill person, meaning ‘a sick person’. The sense ‘bad’ of ill can be also be seen in compounds such as ill-advised and when used as a noun, as in social ills and to speak ill. On the other hand, sick can be used as a predicative adjective, as in to be sick, or else as an attributive adjective, as in a sick person.

Just like there are adjectives associated with the nouns illness and sickness, there is also an adjective associated with the noun disease, namely diseased [dɪ.'zizd], which means ‘suffering from a disease’ (CALD). In this case, the adjective (diseased) is derived from the noun and not the other way around as in the other two cases. This adjective is derived from the past participle of the now obsolete Middle English verb disesen, borrowed in the 14th century from Old French desaaisier ‘to deprive of ease, make uneasy’. The adjective diseased is first attested in the middle of the 15th century. Whereas the adjectives ill and sick are typically used to refer to diseased individuals, the adjective diseased is rarely used to refer to a person. It is more often used to refer to an animal, as in a diseased cow, or to body parts, as in diseased liver.^[2] Also, the adjective diseased has a much stronger sense and it sounds more serious than the adjectives ill and sick do.

Other terms that are synonymous with disease in some contexts are the following:

• ailment (Sp. mal, achaque, dolencia, enfermedad): ‘An illness, disease, or disorder, usually a mild one; a minor complaint affecting part of the body’ (OED); a word created in the early 18th century from the native verb ail and the Latinate suffix ‑ment[3] It is not surprising that, for emphasis, the word ailment is often found modified by the adjective minor, as in minor ailment (cf. Sp. dolencia menor)
• malady (Sp. mal, enfermedad, etc.): a literary word that means ‘any disorder or disease of the body, esp. one that is chronic or deep-seated’ (RHWU); it is more commonly used today figuratively: ‘any undesirable or disordered condition: social maladies; a malady of the spirit’ (RHWU); < 13th century Old French maladie < malade ‘sick’ < Latin male ‘ill’ + habitus ‘having (as a condition)’
• disorder (Sp. dolencia, enfermedad, etc.; (of mind) trastorno): in medicine, ‘a disruption of normal physical or mental functions: a skin disorder’ (also mental disorder, cf. Sp. demencia, trastorno mental, enfermedad mental); in the late 15th century, under the influence of the noun order, this word replaced mid-14th century French loan disordeine (cognate of Sp. desorden), a noun derived from the verb desordainer < Med. Lat. disordinare ‘throw into disorder’ (cf. desordenar); note that Sp. desorden does not have the medical sense of Eng. disorder, though it has the other major sense: ‘a lack of order; a confused or untidy state’ (COED)
• affliction (Sp. mal, dolencia, achaque): ‘something that causes pain or suffering, especially a medical condition’ (DOCE). A c. 1300 loan from Old French affliction, itself an 11th century loan from Latin afflictĭōnem (nominative afflictĭo) ‘pain, suffering, torment’, derived from the verb afflīgĕre ‘to throw down; damage, injure; etc.’ (cf. Eng. afflict ~ Sp. afligir); the Spanish cognate aflicción is a false friend since it means ‘grief, sorrow, woe, woefulness’
• indisposition (Sp. indisposición): a formal word, first attested in the mid-15th century, that in medicine means ‘a minor ailment’ (AHD); the other, perhaps primary sense of this word is ‘disinclination; unwillingness’ (AHD); it is related to the archaic verb indispose ‘make unfit for or averse to something’ (no Spanish cognate) and to dispose (cf. Sp. disponer); the related adjective is indisposed (cf. Sp. indispuesto), whose main meaning is medical, ‘mildly ill, slightly unwell’, and the secondary meaning is not, ‘averse, disinclined, unwilling’, cf. Eng. I am indisposed = Sp. Estoy indispuesto/a; actually, the verb indispose and the noun indisposition were probably a back-formations (in English) from indisposed, which was probably a c. 1400 calque of Late Latin indispŏsĭtus ‘without order, confused’ (cf. patrimonial Sp. indispuesto/a), negative form of dispŏsĭtus ‘disposed, distributed, arranged’, passive participle of dispōnĕre ‘dispose, distribute, arrange’ (cf. Sp. disponer), derived from pōnĕre ‘to place, put, lay’ (cf. Sp. poner)
• morbidity (Sp. enfermedad, etc.): this word was created in the 18th century in English from the adjective morbid, which in medicine means ‘relating to or caused by a disease’ (DOCE; the other, and primary meaning of morbid is ‘characterized by or appealing to an abnormal and unhealthy interest in unpleasant subjects, especially death and disease’, COED, cf. Sp. morbo); morbidity can mean ‘a morbid state or quality’, i.e. ‘illness’, as well as ‘the proportion of sickness or of a specific disease in a geographical locality’ (RHWU; cf. Sp. morbilidad, a calque of Eng. morbidity); Eng. morbid is a mid-17th century loan from Lat. morbidus ‘diseased’ < morbus ‘sickness, disease; etc.’, containing the same root as the verb morī ‘to die’ (cf. Sp. morir), cf. Sp. mórbido/a, which in medicine means ‘morbid’, and elsewhere also ‘gruesome’ and, in literary language, ‘soft, delicate’

Synonyms of Sp. enfermedad

Spanish does not have serious (competing) synonyms for the noun enfermedad and we find that this noun is typically the best way to translate all three English nouns: disease, sickness, and illness. However, the synonym ailment does not typically translate as enfermedad, but rather as dolencia, achaque, or even mal. The latter can be used as a synonym of enfermedad in some contexts.

Sp. dolencia ‘ailment, complaint, illness’ used to be a synonym of enfermedad in Old Spanish, which was the preferred word in earlier times. It can still be used as a synonym, though dolencia today sounds less serious than enfermedad. This noun is derived from the Spanish verb doler ‘to hurt’ and the related noun dolor ‘pain’, and thus it involves the idea of something that hurts, a connection that is obvious to any Spanish speaker using the word dolencia. The noun dolencia also often entails a prolonged or chronic ailment rather than a passing illness.

The Spanish words dolencia, doler, and dolor all go back to a Latin verb dŏlĕre (principal parts: dŏlĕo, dŏlĕre, dŏlŭi, dŏlĭtum), most basically meaning ‘to hurt’. This verb could be used for physical pain, meaning ‘to feel pain, suffer pain, be in pain, to ache’, but also for mental pain, meaning ‘to grieve for, deplore, lament, be sorry for, be afflicted at or on account of any thing’ (L&S). This verb is the source of patrimonial Sp. doler ‘to hurt’, a verb used like gustar. As for the noun dolor, it comes from Latin dŏlōrem, accusative of dŏlor also having a physical sense and a mental sense, i.e. ‘pain’ and ‘grief’.[4] Another related word is the noun duelo, from Late Latin and Vulgar Latin dŏlus ‘pain, grief’, which now means ‘ grief, affliction’, ‘mourning’, ‘wake’, and ‘cortege, funeral procession’.[5] Another related word is the verb adolecer (de) ‘to suffer (from)’, as in Mi madre adolece del corazón ‘My mother has a heart condition’, though it is used mostly figuratively, as in Adolece de confiado e inocente ‘His faults are overconfidence and naivete’ (GDLEL).

The noun achaque also means something like ‘ailment’ and it contains the idea that it is a chronic one, albeit not a major or fatal one. It is often found in the phrase achaques de la vejez ‘old-age ailments’. According to the DLE this noun is derived from the Spanish verb achacar ‘to impute, attribute, accuse’, a 13th century borrowing from a variant of Arabic شكا (šakā) ‘to complain’. Presumably the noun achaque is just a noun derived from the verb achacar, as many other nouns with the ‑e inflection are derived from the stems of verbs, such as cortar ~ corte ‘cut’, empujar ~ empuje ‘push’, and so on. Note, however, that the verb achacar has nothing to do with health issues. Corominas thinks that the Spanish noun achaque does not come from this verb, but rather from an Arabic noun related to the Arabic verb we just saw, transliterated šakâ, that meant ‘complaint’, but also ‘body ailment, habitual illness’. It is not too hard to see how the sense ‘ailment’ might have been derived from the sense ‘complaint’, cf. Eng. health complaint.

Finally, the Spanish noun mal can also mean ‘sickness’, in addition to ‘evil’, depending on the context, in a way that is reminiscent of the uses of the word ill in English through time. Thus, in luchar contra el mal ‘to fight against evil’, the word mal has the latter meaning and in tener mal de estómago ‘to have a stomach ache/illness’ or in tener muchos males ‘to have lots of ailments’, it has the former one. Note that although in these examples mal is used as a noun, Sp. mal is primarily an adverb that means ‘bad(ly)’ or ‘ill/evil’ (in the adverbial sense, seen above), as in cantar mal ‘to sing badly’ or hablar mal el inglés ‘to speak English poorly’, or hablar mal de alguien ‘to speak ill of somebody’. In certain contexts, however, adverbial mal translates as sick, as for example in encontrarse mal ‘to feel sick’.

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[1] This ‘evil’ sense of the word ill can still be gleaned in the expressions speak ill or think ill of somebody, which mean ‘to say or think bad things about somebody’ (OALD).

[2] Spanish speakers have a hard time distinguishing between the adjectives diseased [dɪ.'zizd] and deceased [dɪ.ˈsist] ‘someone who has died, especially recently’ (DOCE). That is because the two words only differ in the sounds [s] ~ [z], which are not distinguished in Spanish (in this phonetic environment).

[3] Eng. ail ‘(archaic) to feel ill or have pain’, ‘to cause physical or mental pain or uneasiness to; trouble’ (AHD). Interestingly, this verb is only used with non-definite subjects like what or nothing, as in What ails you? or Nothing ails me. You cannot say, for example, My head ails me.

[4] Note that the English word pain can also be used with a physical and a mental senses. This word is a late 13th century loanword from Old French peine, paine, peinne, or pene, also having both senses. These words are cognate with Sp. pena, a false friend that means ‘sentence, punishment’, ‘hardship, trouble, difficulty’, as well as ‘grief, sorrow’, and, derived from this latter sense, ‘embarrassment’ and ‘pity’ in some dialects.

[5] Note that there is a second Spanish word duelo, cognate with Eng. duel, with the same meaning. These words have a different source, for they are both learned borrowings from Medieval Latin duellum ‘fight between two men’, a word derived from Old Latin duellum, source of Latin bellum ‘war’. The ‘fight between two men’ sense no doubt came from a similarity with the Latin numeral dŭŏ ‘two’ (no connection).

Infectious diseases, Part 1a: Introduction

[This entry is an excerpt from the chapter "Words about infectious diseases" of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

Introduction

An infectious disease is one ‘caused by the entrance into the body of organisms (as bacteria, protozoans, fungi, or viruses) which grow and multiply there’ (MW). There are many types of infections, from the mild common cold to some that are quite lethal. Approximately 17% of all deaths are caused by infectious diseases nowadays.

An infection is typically communicated from another organism, such as another human or animal, and thus, an infectious disease is also known as a communicable disease or a transmissible disease (Sp. enfermedad transmisible), which is defined as ‘an infectious disease transmissible from person to person, animal to animal, animal to man, or man to animal by direct contact with an affected individual or his discharges or by indirect means (as by a vector)’ (WNTIU). (Cf. the related words Eng. transmission ~ Sp. transmisión, Eng. transmit ~ Sp. transmitir.) When the transmission takes place from an affected person (or their discharges) to another, a communicable disease is also known as a contagious disease (Sp. enfermedad contagiosa).

There are many types of agents of infection, also known as (‘bad’) germs or pathogens (Sp. gérmenes nocivos). The main meaning of the words Eng. germ ~ Sp. germen is ‘a microorganism, especially one which causes disease’ (COED). Eng. borrowed the word germ [ˈʤɜɹm]] in the 15th century from Middle French germe with the meaning ‘an initial stage from which something may develop: the germ of a brilliant idea’ (COED). In the 17th century it developed the sense ‘a portion of an organism capable of developing into a new one or part of one’ (COED), as in the phrase wheat germ. The ‘pathogen’ or ‘harmful microorganism’ sense developed in the late 19th century, probably in the French version of this word (1873). The word ultimately comes from Lat. germen (genitive: germĭnis) ‘a sprig, offshoot, sprout, bud’ (L&S). Spanish borrowed the word germen directly from the Latin nominative germen in the 18th century, calquing all the three senses the cognate word has in English and French.

The best-known germs are viruses and bacteria, but there are others, such as viroids, prions, nematodes (such as parasitic roundworms and pinworms), arthropods (such as ticks, mites, fleas, and lice), fungi (such as ringworm), and other macroparasites (such as tapeworms and other helminths) (WP). For more on these different types of germs, see §34.2.9 below. Some of the most common infectious diseases are influenza (flu, grippe), measles, cholera, diphtheria, smallpox, malaria, meningitis, pneumonia (many different causes), strep throat, typhoid (fever), tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, malaria, yellow fever, and various sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). All of these diseases will be explored in this chapter.^[1]

The fact that many diseases are caused by microorganisms, living organisms that are too small to be seen, was discovered only recently in the history of humanity. The claim that diseases are caused by microorganisms is known as the germ theory of disease (Sp. teoría microbiana de la enfermedad or teoría germinal de las enfermedades infecciosas). The theory was first proposed in the 16th century by Girolamo Fracastoro, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that the theory started to be accepted after it became associated with scientists such as the French Louis Pasteur and the German Robert Koch. Bacteria (sing. bacterium; Sp. bacteria) were first observed in 1676 by Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, but viruses were not discovered until the 1890s.

The first attempt to explain disease rationally, not by appealing to supernatural (magical or religious) forces, was with the Ancient Greeks, though their theories were not scientific or very empirical. In the 5th century BCE, Empedocles theorized that the universe was composed of four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, and this led to a later proposal by the Hippocratic school that humans contained four bodily humors, blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile), and that disease was the result of an imbalance or disharmony among the four humors. This theory, known as humorism or humoralism, actually may have had its origin in Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, and it was prevalent in Western, as well as Arab, medicine until the 19th century.

Note that magical theories of disease survived during this time as well, since many people still ascribe the source of diseases to divine punishment, evil supernatural creatures (demonic theory of disease), or even the sun, the moon, or the planets (sol-lunar and planetary theories of disease). The germ theory of disease was anticipated by the miasma (or miasmatic) theory of disease (Sp. teoría miasmática de la enfermedad). According to this theory (certain) diseases were caused by miasma, a noxious form of ‘bad air’, also known as ‘night air’, which is not way off the mark since germs thrive in decomposing matter.[2] Note that we still do not understand the nature of all diseases and some diseases may have a strong psychological component, namely the psychosomatic diseases (Sp. enfermedades sicosomáticas).

Not all diseases are caused by microorganisms, however. Infection is only one of the possible causes of disease. The word disease can be defined as ‘a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable environmental factors’ (RHWU). We will discuss the different sources and types of disease in §34.2 below.

In addition, although there is no doubt today that microorganisms or germs are the cause of many diseases, there is little doubt that for these microorganisms to cause disease, the body must first succumb to the invation. In other words, the natural defenses of the body must lose the battle with the infectious body. This is much more likely to happen in individuals who are weakened due to poor health and poor nutrition, for example, or who live in conditions where they are more exposed to the pathogens. This explains the difference in infections and disease between more healthy and wealthy individuals in society and more unhealthy and poorer ones.

Modern medicine has developed a number of medications (Sp. medicamentos) and other methods to deal with infections by germs, such as:

• antibiotics (1894) (Sp. antibióticos): noun/adjective formed in French (1889); the noun means ‘A substance which is capable of destroying or inhibiting the growth of bacteria or other micro-organisms; spec. one that is produced by another micro-organism (or is a synthetic analogue of a microbial product), and is used therapeutically’ (SOED). The word antibiotic was coined in French as antibiotique, derived from the Ancient Greek prefix ἀντι‑ (anti‑) ‘against’ and the adjective βιωτικός (biōtikós) ‘concerning or relating to life’, derived from the noun βίος (bíos) ‘life’.
• antivirals (1929?) (Sp. antivirales): noun/adjective derived from an earlier antivirus (1903) to refer to ‘a substance which is active or effective against viruses’ (OED) (the word antivirus is used to day mostly as a noun used in computing for ‘software designed to detect and usually delete computer viruses’ (WNTIU).
• antifungals (1945) or fungicides (Sp. fungicidas): antifungal is an adjective/noun, originally an adjective meaning ‘destroying fungi or inhibiting their growth’ (MWC); the noun fungicide was formed in English (1889) from fungus + ‑cide (fung‑i‑cide) (adj. fungicidal); Sp. fungicida (DRAE: 1970; cf. Part I, Chapter 5, §5.11.1)
• antiprotozoals (Sp. antiprotozoarios): a recently created noun/adjective (still not found in most dictionaries) for ‘a medicinal drug used to fight diseases (like malaria) that are caused by protozoa’ (WN); Spanish has calqued this word as antiprotozoarios.
• anthelmintics or antihelminthics (Sp. antihelmínticos): a late 17th century adjective for a medicine ‘used to destroy parasitic worms’ (COED), also used as a noun; it is a loanword from post-classical Latin anthelminthica (plural), used as noun of neuter plural of anthelminthicus or anthelminticus, a word formed from ant‑, a variant before h of the prefix ἀντι‑ (anti‑) ‘against’ and Ancient Greek ἕλμινθ-, combining form of ἕλμινς (hélmins; genitive: ἕλμινθος hélminthos) ‘intestinal, parasitic worm’ (Sp. lombriz intestinal, gusano parásito); Sp. antihelmíntico: RAE, 1884 and earlier dictionary: 1853)

There are also different ways to prevent the germs from reaching us or cause infection in the first place, such as the use of aseptic surgical techniques, antiseptic substances, and the introduction of substances that help the body fight infection, such as vaccines (Sp. vacunas) and antibodies (also known as immunoglobulin; Sp. anticuerpos, inmunoglobulinas).

In this chapter, we are going to look at some of the vocabulary used to talk about infectious diseases in English and Spanish, comparing the two. We will find that there are many cognates among these words, but also some equivalent words that are not cognate, or even fully equivalent.

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[1] The most lethal diseases are tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS, which kill around 5 million people a year (out of 300 million cases). Tuberculosis alone causes about 2 million deaths per year. The most common infectious disease is Hepatitis B, which has infected a quarter of the world population, but does not kill you right away (chronic infections can eventually cause cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer). The flu (influeza) kills 20,000 people in the US each year, though there are occasional flu epidemics that can be quite lethal, such as the so-called Spanish flu, which killed half a million people in the US in 1918. Malaria affects as many as 500 million people each year and kills between one and three million. Measles is still found in the developing world, despite the existence of a vaccine, and it kills as many as a quarter million people a year.

[2] The cognates Eng. miasma ~ Sp. miasma come ultimately from the Ancient Greek noun μίασμα (miasma) that primarily meant ‘pollution, defilement’. This noun is derived from the verb μιαίνω (miaíno) ‘stain, paint (in color); sully, pollute, contaminate, taint’. English miasma is first attested in 1665 and its French cognate, miasme, in 1695. Eng. miasma is a poetic/literary word that means literally ‘a highly unpleasant or unhealthy smell or vapor’ and, figuratively, ‘an oppressive or unpleasant atmosphere that surrounds or emanates from something’ (OAD). 

The Spanish cognate miasma (RAE: 1817) is defined as ‘evil effluvium that was believed to be given off by diseased bodies, corrupt materials, or stagnant water’ (DLE, original: ‘Efluvio maligno que, según se creía, desprendían cuerpos enfermos, materias corruptas o aguas estancadas’). Sp. miasma was originally a masculine noun, just like all loanwords from Greek words derived with the noun-forming suffix ‑ma, such as problema, but it is not uncommon to hear even educated people use miasma as feminine today. This word does not have a figurative sense and it is used mostly in the plural, as miasmas.

Vascular accidents, Part 2: Strokes

[This entry consists of the second section of a new chapter ("Words about vascular accidents", still unincorporated) of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unusual Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

The noun stroke (/ˈstɹoʊ̯k/) in English can refer to ‘a sudden disabling attack or loss of consciousness caused by an interruption in the flow of blood to the brain’ (COED), which results in cell death. This is the fifth (out of five) senses for the noun stroke in the COED dictionary. The AHD gives a similar, but more complete, definition (sixth sense out of thirteen):

A sudden loss of brain function caused by a blockage or rupture of a blood vessel to the brain, characterized by loss of muscular control, diminution or loss of sensation or consciousness, dizziness, slurred speech, or other symptoms that vary with the extent and severity of the damage to the brain. Also called cerebral accident, cerebrovascular accident.

The original sense of the patrimonial noun stroke is, of course, ‘the act of striking’ or, in the words of the AHD, ‘the act or an instance of striking, as with the hand, a weapon, or a tool; a blow or impact’ (AHD). Most dictionaries still give that as the word's primary sense, though it would seem that for most speakers that sense is probably marginal nowadays, compared to the one we are discussing here. The Spanish equivalent of this sense is golpe.[1] By the 14^th century, the word stroke came to be used for ‘a blow with the hand or a weapon … inflicted on or aimed at a living being’ (OED) or, metaphorically ‘an act which causes pain, injury, or death; often, an act of divine chastisement or vengeance’ (OED). The noun stroke is also commonly used for ‘one of a series of repeated movements’, as in rowing or swimming. These senses came around in the 19^th century.

The use of the word stroke for the health issue at hand is from the late 16^th century and it seems to derive from the phrase Stroke of God’s Hand based on those earlier meanings. It would seem to be a calque of an earlier Latinate expression for this cerebrovascular accident. The earlier term was apoplexy, meaning ‘sudden fit of paralysis and dizziness’, which as late 14^th century loan from Latin (perhaps through French, which borrowed it first). The Latin word was apoplexĭa ‘apoplexy, stroke’, which was itself a loan from Greek ἀποπληξία (apoplēxía) ‘paralysis, etc.’, a noun derived from the verb ἀποπλήσσειν (apoplḗssein) ‘to cripple by a stroke’, which consisted of the parts ἀπό (apó) ‘from’ and the verb πλήσσειν (plḗssein) ‘to strike’.

The noun apoplexy /ˈæp.ə.ˌplɛk.si/ in English is still used as a synonym of stroke, though it is dated or old-fashioned, if not archaic. This is probably because the noun apoplexy developed a secondary colloquial sense over time, namely ‘a fit of extreme anger; rage’ (AHD), ‘extreme anger’ (COED). Interestingly, not all dictionaries mention this ‘secondary’ sense and not all mention that the medical sense is dated.

The cognate of Eng. apoplexy in Spanish is apoplejía, which is also used to refer to a stroke in medicine, though, like its English cognate, it is used less commonly than its alternatives.

There are other words formed with the Greek word part -πληξία (-plēxía), words that end in ‑plexy or ‑plegia in English (the ‑plegia variant was more rare in Greek, but more common in English) and ‑plejia or ‑plejía in Spanish (‑plejia is more common, but not in the word apoplejía). The most comon ones are Eng. hemiplegia ~ Sp. hemiplejia/hemiplejía and Eng. paraplegia ~ Sp. paraplejia /paraplejía:[2]

• Eng. hemiplegia/hemiplexy ~ Sp. hemiplejia/hemiplejía come from New Latin hēmiplēxia, from Ancient Greek ἡµιπληξία ‘a stroke on one side of the body’; the first part of this word is hemi‑ a Latinized version of Greek ἡμι- (hēmi‑) ‘half’. (The variant hemiplegy /ˌhɛ.mɪ.'pli.ʤə/ in English is more common than the hemiplexy /ˈhɛ.mɪ.ˌplɛk.si/ variant and it comes from a rare variant of Gk. ἡµιπληξία, namely ἡµιπληγία.)
  
• Eng. paraplegia /pæ.ɹə.'pli.ʤə/ ~ Sp. paraplejia/paraplejía come from the New Latin words paraplēgia or paraplēxia (respectively) of the equivalent Ancient Greek terms παραπληγία and παραπληξία (respectively), both being synonyms of the former terms in Greek, since they also mean ‘a stroke on one side’, for the first part of these compounds was παρα‑ ‘beside, aside’. The English and Spanish words, however, mean ‘paralysis of the legs and lower body, typically caused by spinal injury or disease’ (COED). More common are the derived adjectives cum nouns Eng. paraplegic ~ Sp. paraplégico/a, derived from the noun paraplēgia by means of the adjectival suffix ‑ic‑.

We should mention that in addition to the noun stroke, which is related to the verb strike, there is also a verb to stroke in English, which means ‘to move your hand gently over something’ (DOCE). The two seem to share the same original root. The verb stroke is attested in Old English as stracian, from the Proto-Germanic root *straik-, from the PIE root *streig-, presumably meaning ‘to stroke, rub, press’ as well as perhaps ‘to strike’. Interestingly, the noun stroke is not attested in Old English, for the noun does not appear in writing until around 1300. The Old English source of the noun stroke has been reconstructed as *strāc and it is believed to come from a variant (o-grade *stroig‑) of the PIE root *streig-.[3]

As we saw, a stroke results in damage to the brain. Strokes are the third cause of death in the Western world and the first cause of disability among adults. The cause of the damage can be of two types. In other words, there are two types of stroke: (1) the most common, ischemic stroke, which is due to lack of blood flow to the brain due to blockage, and (2) the less common, hemorrhagic stroke, due to bleeding in the brain. Almost two thirds of strokes are ischemic and one third hemorrhagic. Other terms for ischemic stroke are cerebral infarction and brain ischemia.

The adjective ischemic /ɪ.ˈski.mɪk/ (spelled ischaemic in the UK) is related to the noun ischemia /ɪ.ˈski.mi.ə/ (spelled ischaemia in the UK), which refers to a restriction in blood supply to tissues, which results in damage to the parts of the body suffering from the restriction, a localized anemia due to lack of blood flow. These are all New Latin words, created in the 19^th century, derived from the actual Ancient Greek word ἴσχαιμος (iskhaimos) ‘stanching or stopping blood’. This word was derived from the morpheme ἴσχ‑ (ískh-) from the Greek verb ἴσχειν (ískhein) ‘to hold back’, and the root αἷμ‑ of the noun αἷμα (haîma) ‘blood’ (the final ‑os is the word’s inflectional ending). To the stem of this word, the Greek derivational suffixes ‑ic and ‑ia were added to come up with ischemic and ischemia (see Part I, Chapter 5). The Spanish cognate of the noun is isquemia and of the adjective is isquémico and they are calques from the English words.

There are several terms in Spanish that are equivalent to Eng. stroke. The most general technical term is accidente cerebrovascular, literally ‘cerebrovascular accident’, which is also a technical term for stroke in English, as we saw above in the AHD definition of stroke. The most common technical and popular term for ‘stroke’ in the Spanish-speaking world nowadays is probably ictus, however. The familiar two types of ictus we saw above are recognized: ictus isquémico ‘ischemic stroke’, also known as infarto cerebral ‘cerebral infarction’, and ictus hemorrágico ‘hemorrhagic stroke’, also known as derrame cerebral or hemorragia cerebral.

English	Spanish
stroke, cerebrovascular accident	ictus, accidente cerebrovascular
ischemic stroke, cerebral infarction, or brain ischemia	ictus isquémico, infarto cerebral
hemorrhagic stroke	ictus hemorrágico, derrame cerebral

The word ictus is a very recent Latin loanword, as its ‑us ending indicates. As all such words, it is felt to be as a Latin word in Spanish (Sp. latinismo). Its generalized use among the general public to refer to (both types of) strokes in Spanish would seem to be a fairly recent calque from Eng. stroke. Latin ictus meant ‘blow, stroke’ (Sp. golpe), which in Latin referred primarily to a ‘rhythmic stroke’. It is derived from the past participle of the third conjugation verb īcĕre (principal parts: īciō/īcō, īcĕre, īcī, īctus), which meant primarily ‘to hit, strike, smite’ and, secondarily, ‘to stab, sting’.

The word ictus had been used in medicine for a while in Spanish. The 22^nd edition of the DRAE (2001) tells us that, in addition to ‘metrical accent’ or ‘rhythmic stroke’, Spanish ictus also means ‘morbid symptoms that appear suddenly and violently as if produced by a blow’.[4] This dictionary’s successor, the 23^rd edition DLE (2014), changed the definition to something like that of ‘stroke’, namely ‘brain illness of vascular origin that appears suddenly’,[5] without making any reference to the origin of the “illness”.

In Spanish, the word ictus has become popular in recent times to refer to what in English is called a stroke. Earlier, it seems, in the Spanish-speaking world, it was more likely that people would refer to a stroke by the type or the subtype of stroke, such as embolismo, aneurisma, etc. So we should explore those other terms as well.

There are four types of ischemic stroke, the main two being Eng. thrombosis ~ Sp. trombosis (or ictus trombótico) and Eng. embolism ~ Sp. embolismo (or ictus embólico). The cognates Eng. thrombosis ~ Sp. trombosis are medical New Latin (18^th century) terms that mean ‘local coagulation or clotting of the blood in a part of the circulatory system’ (COED), with ‘local’ here meaning inside the brain. They are taken from Ancient Greek θρόμβωσις (thrómbōsis) ‘curdling, clotting’, a word derived from θρόμβος (thrómbos, root: thromb‑) ‘lump; blood clot; milk curd’. This last word has also been borrowed by English (late 17^th century) as thrombus and by Spanish as trombo for ‘a blood clot formed in situ within the vascular system of the body and impeding blood flow’ (COED). In the word thrombosis, we recognize the New Latin medical suffix ‑osis (plural ‑oses in English and ‑osis in Spanish) which denotes ‘a process, condition, or pathological state’ (COED). Its source is Ancient Greek ‑ωσις (‑ōsis), meaning ‘state, abnormal condition, or action’. This suffix itself can be subdivided into the ‑ō‑, which indicates that the suffix is attached to an -όω (-óō) stem verb, and the suffix -σις (-sis) found in many Greek loanwords in English and Spanish (e.g. thesis ~ tesis, crisis ~ crisis).

The other type of ischemic stroke is Eng. embolism ≈ Sp. embolia (they are semi-cognates, since they have the same stem, but different derivational endings), also medical New Latin words that mean ‘obstruction of an artery, typically by a clot of blood or an air bubble’ (COED), one which in this case takes place outside the brain but has consequences to blood circulation in the brain. English embolism comes from Late Latin embŏlismus, which meant ‘insertion, intercalation’, primarily ‘insertion or interpolation of days in a calendar (to correct errors)’. English borrowed the word embolism with the ‘intercalation (of days)’ meaning in the 14^th century, but then, in the mid-19^th century, was put to use for the medical sense that we just saw. Spanish had kept its cognate embolismo for the ‘intercalation of days in the calendar’ meaning and has created or borrowed embolia, for the medical sense.

Late Latin borrowed embŏlismus from Late Greek ἐµβολισµός (embolismos) ‘intercalation’, related to ἐµβολή (embole) ‘a throw in, putting in; insertion’ and ἔµβολος (embolos) ‘a plug, wedge, stopper; penis’, derived from the verb ἐµβάλλειν (émbállein) ‘to throw in; to put in, to lay on’, formed from the prefix ἐν‑ in and the verb βάλλειν ‘to throw’. Late Latin also borrowed Greek ἔµβολος (embolos), as embolus, but in Latin, it came to mean ‘piston of a pump’.  English and Spanish have also borrowed this word from New Latin as the cognates Eng. embolus ~ Sp. émbolo. Nowadays, the main meaning of this pair of words is ‘a blood clot, air bubble, piece of fatty deposit, or other object obstructing a blood vessel’ (COED).[6] The Latin term was first borrowed by a German doctor in the mid-19^th century. The other meaning of émbolo in Spanish is ‘piston (plunger)’.

There are few more Spanish-English cognates that share the same stem or the same root as embolism and embolus. One of them is Eng. emblem ~ Sp. emblema, which come from Latin emblema ‘raised ornaments on vessels, tessellated work, mosaic’, from Ancient Greek ἔμβλημα (émblēma) ‘an insertion’, derived from the same verb from ἔμβάλλειν (émbállein). Derived from this word, we have Eng. emblematic ~ Sp. emblemático.

The pair Eng. symbol ~ Sp. símbolo also share the root with the preceding words. They come from Lat. symbŏlus ‘a sign or mark by which one gives another to understand something’, which is a loanword from Gk. σύμβολον (same meaning), derived from συμβάλλειν ‘to throw together, compare, etc’, from the prefix σύν (sún) ‘with, together’ the verb βάλλειν ‘to throw, cast, hurl’. Derived from this pair of cognates there are also other pairs of cognates, such as Eng. symbolic ~ Sp. simbólico/a, Eng. symbolism ~ simbolismo, and Eng. symbolize ~ Sp. simbolizar.[7]

The cognates Eng. problem ~ Sp. problema, also share the same root. They come from Lat. problēma, which is a loanword from Gk. πρόβλημα (próblēma) ‘anything thrown forward, hindrance, obstacle, anything projecting, etc.’, from Gk. προβάλλειν (probállein) ‘to throw out, to put forth’, from προ‑ (pro‑) ‘in front of’ and βάλλειν ‘to throw, cast, hurl’. Related to this pair of cognates are Eng. problematic ~ Sp. problemático/a.

There are also two types of hemorrhagic stroke, namely cerebral hemorrhage (Sp. hemorragia cerebral), which happens inside the brain, and subarachnoid hemorrhage (Sp. hemorragia subaracnoidea), which happens inside the skull but outside the brain. The cognates Eng. hemorrhage ~ Sp. hemorragia are loanwords from Latin haemorrhagia, from Ancient Greek αἱμορραγία (haimorrhagía) ‘a violent bleeding’, a noun derived from αἷμα (haîma) ‘blood’ and ‑ραγία (-ragía), a suffix derived from the verb ῥηγνύναι (rhēgnúnai) ‘to break, burst’.

The cognates Eng. cerebral ~ Sp. cerebral are, of course, adjectives that mean ‘pertaining or relating to the brain’ derived from the unattested Latin adjective *cerebrālis, derived from the noun cĕrēbrum ‘brain; top of the head; skull’, source of Spanish cerebro ‘brain’. This adjectival form seems to have been created in French first, as cérébral, in the 16^th century and then borrowed by English and Spanish.

Another word that is often mentioned in cases of stroke is aneurysm/aneurism ~ Sp. aneurisma. The word means ‘a localized, pathological, blood-filled dilatation of a blood vessel caused by a disease or weakening of the vessel's wall’ (AHD). Ancient Greek ἀνεύρυσμα (aneúrusma) ‘a widening, an opening, a dilation’, from the verb ἀνευρύνειν ‘to widen out’, from the prefix ἀνά (aná) ‘up, back’ and the verb εὐρύνειν to widen’, derived from the adjective εὐρύς (eurús) ‘wide’. The word aneurysm was already in use in English in the mid-17^th century with pretty much the same meaning it has today, hence the rather unorthodox rendition of a Greek word ending in ‑usma. Its Spanish cognate is a more recent borrowing.

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[1] Sp. golpe is said to come from Vulgar Latin *colpus, from an earlier unattested *colŭpus, which was an alteration of Latin cŏlăphus ‘a blow with the fist, cuff, box on the ear’ (Sp. bofetón), from Greek κόλαφος (kólaphos). There is a cognate of Sp. golpe in English, namely Eng. coup /ˈku/, which is a loanword from French coup /ˈku/, which has the same meaning as Sp. golpe (Eng. coup doesn’t have the basic meaning of Fr. coup, only some of the derived ones). Sp. golpe does not conform to what would have been the expected patrimonial evolution of V.Lat. *colpus, which would have been *cuelpo (with initial g, no diphthongization of the short o, and the final -e). In Medieval Spanish, golpe alternated with colpe. Basque kolpe is obviously an early loanword from Romance.

[2] Other medical words formed with the ‘suffix’ ‑plegia in English are cardioplegia, facioplegia, laryngoplegia, logoplegia, monoplegia, nephroplegia, ophthalmoplegia, and panplegia.

[3] The PIE root in question had several forms, basic streig‑, O-grade stroig‑, and zero grade strig‑. Among the English words that descend ultimately from one of these roots (either directly through Proto-Germanic or through Latin as borrowings) are astringent, constrain, distress, prestige, restrict, strain, strait, streak, stress, strict, strike, stringent, stroke, and tricot.

[4] The original Spanish definition is ‘cuadro morboso que se presenta de un modo súbito y violento, como producido por un golpe’. The 22nd edition gives three types for such an illness: ictus apopléjico, ictus epiléptico, and ictus traumático, which are not how the types of ictus are defined today. By the way, the adjective apopléjico is derived from apoplegía, from the Late Latin noun apoplēxia, from Greek ἀποπληξία. This noun’s English cognate is apoplexy, which can mean ‘an illness in your brain which causes you to suddenly lose your ability to move or think’ (DOCE), i.e. it is synonymous with stroke, though that use is rare nowadays, since the most common meaning of this word today is a derived one, namely ‘a fit of extreme anger; rage’ (AHD).

[5] Original: ‘enfermedad cerebral de origen vascular que se presenta de un modo súbito’.

[6] English has also borrowed the other related word ἐµβολή (embole) as embole as a medical term, which is now obsolete. Another, closely related, New Latin medical term in English is emboly, which in embryology, now means ‘the process by which cells move inward during gastrulation to form the archenteron’ (WNW) and, less commonly, in surgery, ‘the name of a particular operation for hernia’ (OED). It is supposedly derived from Gk. ἐµβολία (embolia), which is presumably the source of Sp. embolia, though this Greek word is unattested, so it is probably a New Latin creation.

[7] Late Latin ballāre ‘to dance’ has been said to be a loanword from Gk. βαλλίζειν (ballizein) ‘to dance or jump around’, lit. ‘to throw (one’s body)’, from the same root ball‑. This Latin verb is the source of Sp. bailar ‘to dance’ and balada ‘ballad’, and in English it is the source of the word ball that nowadays means ‘social gathering’ (not the one that means ‘round object’) and, of course, ballad. Another possibility is that the Late Latin verb ballāre is instead a loanword from Gk. πάλλειν ‘to dance, jump about’.