The names of the days of the week, Part 4: Sp. miércoles and related words

[This entry comes from a section of Chapter 20 ("The names of the days of the week") of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

The word miércoles ‘Wednesday’, descends from the Latin phrase diēs mĕrcŭrī ‘day of Mercury’ by dropping of the diēs part. However, the change from mĕrcūrī to miércoles requires even more explaining than the word lunes did, for in addition to the analogical change of the final ‑s, there are a few more sound changes that need explaining, as we shall see.

d	i	ē	s		m	ĕ	r	c	ŭ	r	ī
					m	ie	r	c	o	l	es

This day of the week was consecrated in the Roman calendar to the god known as Mercurius in the nominative case wordform (mĕrcŭrĭŭs, /mɛɾ.ˈkʊ.ɾi.ʊs/). The name of the week diēs mĕrcŭrī was a calque of Ancient Greek ἡμέρᾱ Ἑρμοῦ (hēmérā Hermoû) ‘day of Hermes’.

Mercury was the son of the god Jupiter and the goddess Maia (Hermes was the son of Zeus and Maia, the corresponding gods in the Greek pantheon). The genitive or possessive form of this name was Mĕrcŭrī ‘of Mercury’ in earlier texts and Mĕrcŭriī in later ones (this is important, as we shall see) and the regular stem of the word was Mercuri‑. The stress was on the ŭ in Mercurius, in the antepenultimate syllable, since the penultimate syllable, rĭ, was light.

The name of this god is thought to contain the root merc‑ of Lat. merx ‘merchandise, commodity, goods’, a root that is found in words such as the cognates Eng. market ~ Sp. mercado and Eng. commerce ~ Sp. comercio, all ultimately derived from the noun merx. As for the suffix -urius, it may be of Etruscan origin (OED), for many of the Etruscan gods had such a suffix in their names. The root merc‑ may also be of Etruscan origin.

Mercurius is known as Mercury in English and as Mercurio in Spanish. He was originally the Roman god of commerce and travel. This god was most likely a calque or copy of an Etruscan god. When Rome came in closer contact with Greece in the 3rd century BCE, Mercury became associated with the Greek god Hermes and some of this god’s attributes were copied to Mercury, such as being messenger of the gods, mediator with the afterlife, patron of the arts, etc.

As usual, a planet was named after this god, namely ‘the smallest of the inner planets and the one nearest the sun’ (AHD). The reason for assigning that planet to this god is probably that, because of its smaller orbit, this planet changes position in the sky quite faster than other planets, as viewed from Earth, and fast motion was one of the attributes of the god Mercury, since he was the messenger god and the god of trade and travel. The god Mercury is depicted as wearing winged shoes, known as talaria, and a winged hat, known as petasos.[1]

Figure 108: Statue of Mercury and Minerva, in Blüherpark, Dresden[i]

Let us look now at the sound changes in the word mĕrcūrī as it became miércoles. In total, there are five sound changes that we need to account for:

1.     The final long ī changed to es

2.     The short ĕ changed to ie

3.     The short ŭ changed to o

4.     The stress on the antepenultimate syllable

5.     The second r changed to l

The final s must be an analogical addition, as in the case of lunes, for there is no other explanation. In other words, because the names of the other days of the week (martes, jueves, viernes) end in ‑s, a final ‑s was added to miércoles, by analogy, just as in the case of lunes. Again, this is not something that happened in Spanish, for this addition is already found in Latin inscriptions reflecting popular (Vulgar) Latin speech. But in the case of miércoles the analogy went further than in the case of lunes, for if the addition of the ‑s was all that was analogized, we would have expected the word for Wednesday to be miércolis, all other things being equal. That is because a Latin long ī always became i in Spanish. However, what we find here is an e preceding the s. In other words, what was analogized here were the two final sounds, not just one, that is, the ‑es ending found in the names of other days of the week: lunes, martes, jueves, viernes.

There are two sound changes in this word that are fully regular, in the sense that (unless there were other factors involved) they occurred without exception in the change from Latin to Spanish. The two sound changes are that Latin short ŭ always became o in Spanish and Latin short ĕ always became ie when it was stressed (cf. Part I, Chapter 10, §10.3.2).

The only thing that we need to explain with regards to the last one of these changes is how come the Latin short ĕ happened to be stressed, for in the nominative form, it is the ŭ that is stressed, as we mentioned earlier. That is also where the stress goes in the regular genitive wordform Mĕrcŭriī (Mĕr.cŭ.ri.ī). However, in the irregular genitive form that collapses the last two syllables, Mĕrcŭrī (Mĕr.cŭ.rī), the stress gets shifted one syllable to the left, for Latin stress followed very regular and predictable rules. Basically, in Latin, stress was penultimate if the penultimate syllable was heavy (it had a long vowel or ended in a consonant) and antepenultimate if it was not (cf. Part I, Chapter 8, §8.3.3.4).

Finally, we need to explain the l in Spanish miércoles, for the Latin word has an r there instead. It turns out that it was very common for Latin words that had two r’s to undergo a dissimilatory change in Old Spanish. Sometimes, one of the r’s was dropped, as in the word orquesta ‘orchestra’, from Lat. orchēstra (from Gk. ὀρχήστρα ‘the area of the stage where the chorus danced’; cf. Eng. orchestra). Other times, the second r changed to l, as in this case. Another example of such a change is in the word Spanish árbol ‘tree’, which comes from Latin word arborem (with two r’s; nominative case: arbor) (cf. Part I, Chapter 10, §10.4.5).

Ever since the 14th century this Roman god’s name came to be used in Latin for the silvery, very toxic, metallic element that is liquid at room temperature, which we now know as Eng. mercury ~ Sp. mercurio. The reason for giving this liquid metal this name was presumably its slippery nature. Note that another name for this element in English is quicksilver, which comes from Old English cwicseolfor, which literally means ‘living silver’ (Old English cwic, the source of Mod.Eng. quick, meant ‘alive’, not ‘fast’ as it does now). This English name for the metal was a calque of Latin argentum vīvum. The Romans also called this liquid metal hydrargyrum, which was a loanword from Greek ὑδράργυρος (hydrargyros), a compound word meaning literally ‘water-silver’, from ὑδρ‑ (hydr-), the root of ὕδωρ (húdōr) ‘water’ and ἄργυρος (argyros) ‘silver’. This name is the source of the symbol Hg for this element used in chemistry (cf. Eng. hydrargyrum /haɪ̯.ˈdɹɑɹ.ʤəɹ.əm/).[2]

The word for Wednesday in other Romance languages also stems from the Latin phrase mĕrcŭrī dies. In French it is mercredi, in standard Italian, mercoledì (mèrcore in Venetian and mércuri in Sicilian), in Catalan dimecres, and in Galego and Old Portuguese mércores (in Modern Portuguese, the name is quarta-feira).

Eng. Wednesday

English Wednesday /ˈwɛnz.ˌdeɪ̯/ comes from Old English Wōdnesdæg (among other spellings), which meant literally ‘Wodan’s day’. Wōdnes is the genitive case wordform of the name Wodan, the name of a Germanic god. The name of this god in the North Germanic languages was Odin, cf. Old Norse Óðinn, from Proto-Germanic *Wod-enaz‑. In English, Odin is a loanword from Old Norse.

Wodan had a similar soul-guiding job in Germanic mythology as the Roman god Mercury. He was the messenger god and was associated with speed and trade. He was also in charge of guiding souls to the underworld, that is, the afterlife. Therefore, when translating or calquing the Roman system for naming the days of the week, Wodan was chosen as the equivalent of Mercury.

[GO TO PART 5]

---

[1] Images of Mercury also often have him as well as carrying a caduceus, a herald’s wand or staff. Heralds were gods and others in Greek mythology who delivered messages, made proclamations known, or conducted negotiations. The caduceus is sometimes represented with two snakes wrapped around it and with wings. The caduceus is a symbol that goes back to Ancient Mesopotamia and it became symbol of commerce and negotiation since these two areas rely on balanced exchange and reciprocity. In North America, the caduceus is sometimes used as a symbol of medicine because of a confusion with the Rod of Asclepius, which only has one snake, has no wings, and is the traditional symbol for medicine. Sometimes Mercury and his Greek counterpart Hermes are also depicted with a lyre (Sp. lira), a musical instrument this god is supposed to have invented, out of a tortoise’s shell. According to Ancient Greek mythology, Hermes gave the lyre to Apollo, who in turn, gave him the caduceus.

[2] The ancients, going back to Babylon, recognized seven metals, which they associated with certain heavenly bodies (the ‘seven classical planets’) and to which they ascribed certain curative powers. They were also associated with certain days of the week, as well as certain colors, and certain foods. The metal-planet-day combinations were the following: Sun-gold-Sunday, Moon-silver-Monday, Mars-iron-Tuesday, Mercury-mercury-Wednesday, Jupiter-tin-Thursday, Venus-copper-Friday, and Saturn-lead-Saturday.

---

[i] Source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Merkur_und_Minerva_im_Blueherpark_Dresden-1.jpg (retrieved: 2017.06.14)

Greek influence on the English and Spanish alphabets, Part 1: Introduction

[This entry comes from the second section ("The Greek language and its influence on Latin") of Chapter 8 ("All you need to know about Latin and Greek") of Part I of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

As we have seen, the Latin alphabet grew indirectly out of the Greek alphabet, since it is derived from the Etruscan alphabet, which itself was an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, which was itself an adaptation of the Phoenician one. This original adaptation was the most significant one since, for instance, at the time letters were added for vowels, since the Phoenician alphabet only encoded consonant sounds.

In addition to that primary influence of the Greek alphabet on the Latin one, there were additional ones that came later, when Romans were in close contact with Greek speakers and their language after the former conquered the latter and started to introduce large numbers of Greek words into Latin. In particular, Ancient Greek had some sounds that Latin did not have and when the Romans borrowed words from Greek that had sounds that did not exist in Latin, they had two options. One of them was to borrow those Greek letters. That is how the letters 〈Z〉 and 〈Y〉 entered Latin, though they remained peripheral additions only used to write words of Greek origin. The other solution was to modify existing Latin letters to represent the Greek sounds. They did that for four Greek sounds by adding an 〈H〉 to a similar sounding Latin letters. They did that to the aspirated Greek consonant sounds that did not exist in Latin. The latter solution resulted in the following digraphs, or two-letter combinations, to represent single sounds that were represented by single Greek letters: 〈CH〉, 〈TH〉, 〈PH〉, and 〈RH〉, as we shall see below.

Greek letter			Latin transliteration
Π π	(pi)	[p]	P
Φ φ	(phi)	[pʰ]	PH

Many English words have the letters 〈z〉 and 〈y〉, in words such as zero and myth. In many cases, these words come from Greek. However, because English appropriated these two letters to write English sounds during the Middle Ages, not all of them do. The letter 〈y〉 originally represented only vowels in Greek and Latin and if an English word has a vocalic 〈y〉 that is a sure sign that the word comes from Greek. The sound of this letter is the sound [ɪ] or [aɪ̯] in Modern English. But the letter 〈y〉 is also used in English to represent the consonant sound [j], as in the word you [ˈju], and these words are never of Greek origin.

Spanish too appropriated the letters 〈z〉 and 〈y〉 in the Middle Ages to write sounds that developed in this language that did not exist in Latin. They are used now to represent sounds that are quite different from the ones these letters represented originally. The letter 〈z〉 represents the sound [θ] in Spain and [s] elsewhere. As for the letter 〈y〉, it has been appropriated to represent the consonant sound [j] or [ʝ] (see Chapter 7).

As for the digraphs, many English words have the 〈ph〉, 〈th〉, 〈ch〉, and 〈rh〉 digraphs, each representing a single sound, not two, as in the words physics, theory, chemistry, and rhyme. These words ultimately come from Greek and those letters in English words stem ultimately from the mentioned transliteration of Greek words in Latin. Spanish, on the other hand, did away with these Greek influenced spellings in the 18th century. This explains why they cognates of these English words in Spanish have no h in them: física, teoría, química, and rima.

Again, the way these letters and digraphs are pronounced in English is not necessarily the same way they were pronounced in Greek or in Latin. Take the digraph 〈ph〉, for instance. In English, it represents the same sound as the letter 〈f〉, which is [f] in the phonetic alphabet. In Latin, it represented the sound [pʰ], as aspirated p, i.e. the sound of the letter 〈p〉 in the English word pan [ˈpʰæn] (cf. Sp. pan [ˈpan], with unaspirated p). (The reason for this difference is that the letter Φ (phi) came to be pronounced [f] in Greek at a later time.) Also, as we mentioned, some of these letters and digraphs have come to be used for native English words that have no connection to Greek. The possible sounds of these letters and digraphs have in modern English is summarized in Table 92.

Letters	Sounds	Sample words
〈ph〉	[f]	photograph
〈th〉	[θ]	cloth
	[ð]	these, other
	[tʰ]	Thomas
〈ch〉	[kʰ]	character
	[ʧ]	church
〈y〉	[j]	yes
	[i]	happy
	[ɪ]	myth
	[aɪ̯]	my
〈z〉	[z]	zoo

Table 92: Sounds of the English letters y and z and the digraphs with h

As we can see, the 〈th〉 digraph can represent three different sounds in English: the one in cloth (the IPA symbol for this sound is [θ]), the one in clothes (which, as we saw in Chapter 7, is a different sound, [ð], the voiced counterpart of [θ]), and occasionally the one in Thomas, which is identical to the sound of the letter 〈t〉 all by itself ([tʰ] in IPA). It is this latter one that is most like the sound the Greek inspiration for this digraph had. The use of 〈th〉 to represent the other two sounds is an invention of French scribes after the 11th century and which replaced the perfectly good letters that Old English had to represent those sounds.

Finally, the 〈ch〉 combination can stand for two different sounds in English. The first one is the one it has in the words chin or chap, IPA [ʧ]. The other one is the one it has in the words school, character, Christ or Michael, which is identical to the sound of the letter 〈c〉 in care or the letter 〈k〉 in kid, namely the sound of the phoneme /k/, which is usually aspirated [kʰ]. Only the second of these sounds is anything like the original sound that the Romans set out to represent with the digraph 〈ch〉. The former sound is one that this digraph has is one that did not exist in Latin or Greek but existed in Romance languages and English and the 〈ch〉 digraph was pressed into service to represent it.

What is the deal with these letter combinations? Why are they the way they are and why do they represent the sounds they do? And what is the deal with that 〈h〉, that singular letter which in isolation is sometimes pronounced—as in hair—and sometimes not—as in honor, and which combines with 〈p〉, 〈t〉, 〈c〉 to form totally different sounds? We will need to learn a bit of history of Greek and Latin to sort these questions out.

Infectious diseases, Part 6: Eng. vaccine & Sp. vacuna

[This entry comes from a section of Chapter 32 ("Words about infectious diseases") of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

The modern definition of a vaccine (Sp. vacuna) is ‘a preparation of a weakened or killed pathogen, such as a bacterium or virus, or of a portion of the pathogen’s structure, that upon administration stimulates antibody production or cellular immunity against the pathogen but is incapable of causing severe infection’ (AHD). The idea is to stimulate the body’s natural immune system to create antibodies that will fight a disease, typically an infection, though it could also be a non-infectious disease, such as cancer. The purpose is typically to ward off an infection later on and vaccines that do this are known as prophylactic vaccines (Sp. vacunas profilácticas). Other vaccines are given to already infected people to help them fight the disease they already have and are called therapeutic vaccines (Sp. vacunas terapéuticas).[1]

The Spanish name for this preparation, vacuna, gives us a hint of the origin of its name in both languages. In Spanish, the word vacuna was originally a feminine adjective that meant ‘of a cow’ (masc. vacuno) and is related to the word vaca ‘cow’, which is a patrimonial descendant of Lat. vacca ‘cow’. From the noun vacca (vacc‑a), by means of the adjective-forming derivational suffix ‑īn‑, Latin derived an adjective meaning ‘of or related to cows’ whose masculine form was vaccīnus (vacc‑īn‑us) and whose feminine form was vaccīna (vacc‑īn‑a).

So, what do vaccines have to do with cows? To find out we must go back to the late 18th century when Edward Jenner, and English doctor and scientist, described and named in a particular cow disease, known in English as cow-pox and in Latin, as variolae vaccinae. Literally, variolae is the plural of variola, the Late Latin word for small-pox, which was often pluralized, no doubt because of its association with multiple round pox marks it causes (cf. Sp. viruelas). And vaccinae is a genitive feminine form of an adjective that means ‘of the cow’. This cow disease is known as viruela de la vaca or viruela bovina in Spanish (viruela is Spanish for smallpox).

Edward Jenner discovered that cow-pox is related to the smallpox, which affects humans and is quite deadly (cf. §32.3.40 below). He discovered that humans could also be infected by cowpox and that those who did recovered quickly from the disease and, most importantly, developed an immunity to smallpox, a much more lethal disease. The purposeful infection of humans with cowpox in order to give them immunity to smallpox is considered to be the first generation of vaccines, many of which were developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Then in the 19th century, French scientist Louis Pasteur was working on the second generation of vaccines for different diseases and he decided to name these biological preparations after the name Jenner gave to the cowpox disease, in his honor. That is because cow-pox is known in French as variole de la vache or just vaccine, after the second part of the Latin name.

The French term vaccine, meaning ‘cow-pox’, was borrowed into English as the name of these prophilactic preparations that were injected in people, pronounced /ˌvæk.ˈsin/. Other languages made their own adaptations to the original term. In Italian and Portuguese, the term is vaccina, by merely changing the French ‑e ending to the feminine ‑a ending native in those languages. Spanish, on the other hand, already had a native adjective derived from vaca, namely vacuno/a ‘of the cow, bovine’, first attested in the 13th century, and it derived the noun vacuna ‘vaccine’ from the feminine form of this adjective.[2] We find the adjective that this noun comes from most commonly in the collocation ganado vacuno, which translates into English as beef cattle. The Spanish adjectival suffix ‑un‑ would seem to be a rare variant of the Latin suffix ‑īn‑, which also turned nouns into adjectives. It is found only in a few words, such as perruno/a ‘canine’ (15th century; < perro ‘dog’).[3] Note that in modern French, vaccine was remade into a masculine noun, namely vaccin /vak.sɛ̃/, which is how you say vaccine today, for Fr. vaccine /vak.ˈsin/ means ‘cowpox’.

In English, from the noun vaccine, the verb vaccinate /ˌvæk.sɪ.ˈneɪ̯t/ was derived, by means of the Latinate verbal suffix ‑ate. And from this verb, the noun vaccination /ˌvæk.sɪ.ˈneɪ̯.ʃən/ was created by means of the noun suffix ‑tion, which is typically added to Latinate English verbs that end in ‑ate (cf. Part II, Chapter 8). This noun can refer to ‘the act of vaccinating’, but it also be a synonym of the noun vaccine, one that is even more common than the original noun, e.g. polio vaccination ‘vacuna contra la polio’. Analogous derivations happened in Spanish. From the noun vacuna (vacun‑a), the verb vacunar ‘to vaccinate’ (vacun-ar) was created and, from this verb, the noun vacunación ‘vaccination’ (vacun-ación). In Spanish, however, the noun vacunación refers merely to ‘the act of vaccinating’ but is not a synonym of the noun vacuna. The transitive Spanish verb vacunar is often used reflexively, i.e. as an intransitive verb. The reflexive verb vacunarse translates as to be/get vaccinated.

---

[1] The adjectives Eng. prophylactic ~ Sp. profiláctico/a, meaning something like ‘precautionary’, are loanwords from Greek προϕυλακτικός (prophulaktikos), an adjective made from the following Ancient Greek parts: πρό (pró) ‘before’ and φύλαξις (phúlaxis) ‘a watching, guarding’, a noun derived from the verb φῠλᾰ́σσειν (phulassein) ‘to watch, guard, protect, defend’. The adjectives Eng. therapeutic /ˌθɛ.ɹə.ˈpju.tɪk/ ~ Sp. terapéutico/a /t̪e.ɾa.ˈpeu̯.t̪i.ko/ come from New Latin therapeuticus ‘curing, healing’, from Ancient Greek θεραπευτικός (therapeutikós) ‘attentive, helpful, obliging, curative’. It first appeared in French in the 16th century and from that language it was borrowed into English and Spanish. This adjective was derived from the noun θεραπευτής (therapeutḗs) ‘one who waits on another, an attendant’ (cf. Sp. terapeuta ‘therapist’), which itself is derived from the verb θερᾰπεύειν (therapein) ‘to wait on, attend, serve, cure’, which itself is derived from the noun θερᾰ́πων (therápōn) ‘attendant, aide, etc.’.

[2] A synonym of the adjective vacuno/a is bovino/a, a cognate of Eng. bovine. These cognates come from Lat. bovīnus/a ‘relating to cattle, from bōs ‘a cow, bull, or ox’ (gen. bŏvis, acc. bŏvem; regular stem: bov‑). Eng. beef is a 14th century loan from Old French buef or boef ‘ox, beef; ox hide’ (modern French: bœuf /ˈbœf/), from Latin bŏvem (accusative form of bōs). Sp. buey ‘ox’ is a patrimonial descendant of the same word bŏvem.

[3] Other words that have the adjectival suffix ‑un‑ are: moruno/a ‘moorish’ (15th century; < moro ‘Moor’), lebruno (< liebre ‘hare), montuno ‘of the mountain’ (< monte ‘mountain’), bajuno (< bajo/a ‘low’), cerduno ‘of pigs’ (< cerdo ‘pig’), frailuno ‘monkish’ (< fraile ‘monk’), and boyuno (rare) ‘bovine’ (< buey ‘ox’).

Personal names, Part 3: Hypocorisms

[This entry is the first part (of three) of the third section ("Hypocorisms") of Chapter 46 ("Personal names") of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

In addition to regular names, in many cultures there are special versions of a person’s name used only in familiar circumstances. Sometimes these personal names, used by close friends and relatives, are known as diminutives (Sp. diminutivos), nicknames and sobriquets (Sp. apodos, motes), and pet names (Sp. sobrenombres, nombres cariñosos).[i]

The technical word for such names is hypocorisms in English and (nombres) hipocorísticos in Spanish.[ii] English also uses the adjective hypocoristic as a noun, with the same meaning. The word’s origin is Greek, obviously. It is derived from the Greek verb ὑποκορίζομαι (hupokorízomai), which now means ‘to talk in a childish manner’, which in Ancient Greek was formed from the prefix ὑπό (hupó, cf. Eng. hypo‑ and Sp. hipo‑) ‘under, secretly’ and the root κορίζομαι (korízomai) ‘to caress’, which itself is formed from the root κόρ‑ (kór-) ‘child’, cf. κόρος (kóros) ‘boy’, κόρη (kórē) ‘girl’.

Hypocorisms in personal names are primarily either shortened names, e.g. Tony < Anthony, or they contain a diminutive suffix, e.g. Johnny < John, or both, e.g. Vicky < Victoria, Cindy < Cynthia. Shortenings are very common in English, e.g. Al (< Allan, etc.), Bert (< Albert), Amy (< Amanda), Carol or Lyn < Caroline, Dave < David, Dan < Daniel, Gabe < Gabriel, Ken < Kenneth, Mike < Michael, etc.

In English the suffix -y or ‑ie, both pronounced [i], is often added to names to turn them into hypocorisms, as in Johnny < John. Sometimes this suffix is added to the shortened version of the name, e.g. Kenny < Ken < Kenneth, Mikey (Micky) < Mike < Michael, and sometimes it replaces the final syllable, e.g. Charly < Charles, Judy < Judith.

A major way to turn personal names into hypocorisms in Spanish is by adding the diminutive suffix ‑it‑ (‑ito in the masculine and ‑ita in the feminine), e.g. Juanito < Juan, Anita < Ana. Another way to create Spanish hypocorisms is by shortening, as in English, e.g. Manu < Manuel, Alber < Alberto, Javi < Javier, Lupe < Guadalupe. This happens to compound given names as well (see below), e.g. Juanma < Juan Manuel, Juanra < Juan Ramón. We even find shortenings of diminutives, such as Fito < Adolfito < Adolfo. Additionally, there are many nicknames that are corruptions and other non-transparent alterations of the name, e.g. Pepe < José, Pancho/Paco/Curro < Francisco, Lola < María Dolores, Charo < María del Rosario, etc.

Some of the alterations found in hypocoristics could be the result of how children pronounce certain sounds that are difficult to pronounce, as in the nickname Quique, from Enrique. The common nickname Pepe, so different from the ‘real’ version of the name, José, is probably borrowed from Italian, where Peppe (as well as Beppe and other fpr,s) are hypocorisms of the Italian version of the name, namely Giuseppe. (José and Joseph ultimately come from the Hebrew yôsef (יוסף), which became Ιωσηφ (Ioseph) in Greek and Ioseph in Latin.) The origin of the nickname Paco for Francisco is unknown too, but it may also come from Italian, where Franco is an alternative of the name Francesco, from where Francisco comes, and Paco is a reasonable child-speak version of Franco.

Curiously, we find Spanish hypocorisms that end in ‑i, pronounced [i],identical in sound to a common English way of  creating hypocorisms. Some of these are probably due to English influence, such as Susi < Susana (cf. Eng. Susie), Viki < Victoria (cf. Eng. Vickie). Others may have been formed by analogy, such as Pili < Pilar < Maria del Pilar (see above).

A hypocorism may come from another language. That is the case of the hypocorisms Concha and Conchita of the woman’s name Concepción, which is an interesting case study on how names change and travel.[iii] The name Concepción comes from Latin stem conceptiōn‑, a noun form derived from the (past participle stem concep‑) of the Latin verb concĭpĕre (con+cap+ĕre; cf. Part II, Chapter 9), meaning ‘to receive, catch, grasp’. From this verb come the cognate verbs Sp. concebir and Eng. conceive come from that Latin verb and both mean, among other things, ‘to become pregnant’.

The name Concepción makes reference to the conception of Jesus in his mother’s womb, which according to Christian dogma took place without human intervention, hence the terms Eng. Immaculate Conception and Sp. inmaculada concepción, which is the source of the name.[1] Interestingly, the hypocorisms Conchita for this name were taken from their Italian Concetta, which is not a hypocorism, but the equivalent of Sp. Concepción (from Lat. concepta ‘conceived’, the feminine form of Lat. conceptus).[iv] The Italian hypocorisms of Concetta are Cettina, Tina, Titina, and Cetta. Of these, Tina is not an uncommon first name in recent times in the United States, for instance. (There is a male version of this name in Italian, but not in Spanish, namely Concetto.)[2]

Finally, Spanish speakers reinterpreted Conchita, which literally happens to mean ‘little shell’ in Spanish, as a diminutive, and so from it they derived the other hypocorism for this name, Concha, which literally means ‘shell’. (In some parts of the Spanish-speaking world, such as most of the southern cone of South America, concha is a vulgar word for the female sexual parts and thus the hypocorisms Concha and Conchita are avoided there.)

---

[1] Traditionally, the name Concepción was actually a shortening of Inmaculada Concepción. Women bearing this name typically shorten it to Inmaculada, whose hypocorism is Inma in some places.

[2] From the past participle form conceptus of the verb concĭpĕre, meaning ‘received, caught; derived from; etc.’, Latin derived the identical noun conceptus ‘embryo/fetus; cistern; etc.’, and Medieval Latin the noun conceptum ‘something conceived, draft, abstract’. From this latter noun come the nouns Sp. concepto and Eng. concept (16th century), which at their most basic mean ‘thing conceived’ and, more particularly ‘an abstract idea’ (COED). English also has a technical word conceptus to refer to ‘the embryo during the early stages of pregnancy’ (COED).

---

[i] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminutive, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nickname, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_endearment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobriquet

[ii] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocorism, https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipocor%C3%ADstico

[iii] Cf. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concepci%C3%B3n_(nombre)

[iv] Cf. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concetta

The names of the days of the week, Part 3: Sp. lunes and related words

[This entry comes from a section of Chapter 20, "The names of the days of the week", of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

Sp. lunes

The evolution of the Spanish word lunes ‘Monday’ is analogous to that of martes that we just saw, with only a minor difference. Sp. lunes comes from Lat. diēs lūnae ‘day of the Moon’, by the dropping of the diēs part. Lat. lūnae ‘of the Moon’ was the genitive wordform of the word lūna ‘Moon’. However, as you may have noticed, something is not quite right here, for there is an s at the end of the word lunes which was not there in the Latin phrase. In other words, whereas martes looks just like we would have expected it, the word lunes does not. the word for ‘Monday’ should have been *lune in Spanish, not lunes. The fact that Spanish lunes has an e instead of the Latin diphthong ae, which in Classical times was pronounced [ai̯], was to be expected, for that is what happened to this diphthong in Spanish patrimonial words by regular sound change (and even in loanwords from Latin, by analogy). But the appearance of the final s is not a regular sound change.

The only way that we can explain the final s of lunes is that it must have been added by analogy with the s that existed at the end of the names of other days of the week, also derived from genitive (possessive) cases that had a final ‑s, namely the words that have given us martes from mārtĭs, as well as jueves from iovĭs, and viernes from vĕnĕrĭs, all of which ended in ‑s. The reason that the genitive lunae did not have a final s is that this one was a first declension word and the genitive case in the first, second, and fifth declensions did not end in ‑s, like it did in the third and fourth declensions (cf. Part I, Chapter 8, §8.4.2.1).

We have evidence that already in the Vulgar (spoken) Latin of later centuries, the word for ‘Monday’ was sometimes changed from diēs lūnae to diēs lūnis, with a final s, by analogy with the names of other days of the week. Thus, this is something that happened early in the change from Latin to the Romance languages and not a peculiarity of Spanish.

This kind of sound change is very different from the other, more common type of sound change, such as the one responsible for Latin ae changing to Spanish e, which was a regular sound change, one which could be summarized thus: ‘Whenever there is ai in a Latin word, we find e in a Spanish that descended from it by word of mouth’. The type of change that resulted in the word lunes having a final s is called analogical sound change. This kind is much more sporadic and unpredictable than the regular sound changes that applied to all sounds (in a particular phonetic context) equally. We find analogical sound change in contexts in which a word becomes associated with others in a set, such as a paradigm.

Lat. luna

As for the Latin word luna (in the nominative case form), there is evidence that it comes from Old Latin losna, a word that has been traced to Proto-Indo-European *lowksneh₂, derived from the root *lewk- ‘to light, shine; see; be bright’. This PIE root is also found in Lat. lūx (acc. lūcem), the source of Sp. luz ‘light’, and Lat. lūmen (acc. lūmen, gen. lūmĭnis), the source of Sp. lumbre ‘fire, flame’ and, ultimately, of Eng. luminous. This same root is also the source of the native English word light, which comes from Old English leoht ‘light, daylight’.

The Spanish word luna descended orally from Latin without undergoing any changes. All other Romance languages have kept this word too, though in some of those languages, the word has changed somewhat, e.g. It. luna, Fr. lune /ˈlyn/, Port. lua and Gal. lúa /ˈlu.a/ (earlier lũa /ˈlũ.a/), and Cat. lluna /ˈʎu.na/.

Lat. luna was the name of the Earth’s satellite, the moon (the name is sometimes capitalized to Moon), but it was also the name of a moon goddess in ancient Roman religion and myth, a ‘personification’ of the moon itself (there were two other lunar goddesses, Diana and Juno, but only Luna personified the Moon). She is typically represented with a female body with a crescent moon over her head and driving a white two-yoke chariot. Luna was the female counterpart and complement of the Sun (Sol), which was conceived of as a (male) god. That is the reason that the word luna was feminine in Latin and is still feminine in Spanish.

The reason the day of the week was called diēs lūnae ‘day of the Moon’ in Latin was that this day of the week was consecrated to the moon goddess, just like Tuesday was consecrated to Mars, the god of war, as we saw earlier. As we will see later, the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons calqued this identification of this day of the week with the moon, which is why the day of the week in English is called Monday, from Old English Mōnandæg ‘moon day’ or ‘day of the moon’.

As usual, this Roman goddess had a Greek counterpart, whose name was Σελήνη (Selḗnē). The name has been ported into English as Selene, pronounced /sə.ˈli.ni/, and into Spanish as Selena /se.ˈle.na/, from a Latinized version of the name. Selena is a woman’s name in Spanish and Russian, for example. Luna is also a woman’s name in many languages.

Interestingly, English also has the word luna, though it is quite rare and most English speakers have never heard of it. Besides its use as the name for the Roman goddess of the moon, which is capitalized (Luna), Eng. luna has been used at different times, with different meanings. In alchemy, a pseudo-science practiced in the Middle Ages, luna meant ‘silver’. The word luna, or luna-moth, is used in entomology to refer to a ‘large grey-green N. American saturniid moth, Actias luna, with crescent-shaped spots and long curved tails on the wings’ (SOED).

Sp. luna has other meanings besides ‘moon’. In particular, it is used to refer to certain things made of panes of glass, such as to ‘a large sheet of glass used in mirrors [luna de espejo], shop windows [luna de escaparate], car windshields [luna de coche], etc.’ The source of this second meaning of Sp. luna seems to be the same word luna that means ‘moon’, though it is not clear how the derived meaning came about. In addition to luna llena, there is another word for ‘full moon’ in Spanish that contains the root lun‑, namely plenilunio, a loanword from Lat. plēnĭlūnĭum (plēn‑ĭ‑lūn‑ĭ‑um).

Words derived from Lat. luna

From the Latin noun lūna (lūn‑a), an adjective was derived by means of the adjectival suffix ‑ār‑. (Actually, the suffix was ‑āl‑, but the l of this suffix changed to r when following a root that had an l in it.) Adjectives derived with this suffix took third declension endings, such as masculine and feminine nominative singular ‑is. Thus, the adjective is typically given its form lūnāris (lūn‑ār‑is). Its meaning was ‘of the Moon’ or ‘lunar’.

As you may have guessed, Lat. lūnāris is the source of the English and Spanish adjectives lunar, pronounced /ˈlun.əɹ/ in English and /lu.ˈnaɾ/ in Spanish. The adjective lunar came into English in the early 15th century through Old French, first with the meaning ‘crescent-shaped’. Its current meaning is ‘of, determined by, or resembling the moon’ (COED) and we find it in phrases such as lunar landing (Sp. alunizaje), lunar surface (Sp. superficie lunar), lunar month (Sp. mes lunar), lunar rock (Sp. roca lunar), or lunar eclipse (Sp. eclipse lunar). In some of these cases we can substitute lunar with moon, used as a modifier in a noun-noun compound, e.g. moon landing or moon surface (cf. Part I, Chapter 5). Other times, it is equivalent to the modifying phrase of the moon, as in surface of the moon (Sp. superficie de la luna).

The Spanish adjective lunar is probably a learned loanword from Latin and not a patrimonial word, that is, one that was not transmitted uninterruptedly by word of mouth but rather borrowed from written Latin later on as a learned (fancy) word (though it is not fancy any longer). In addition, this adjective has also been converted into a noun in Spanish, the masculine noun lunar. The main meaning of this noun is ‘mole’, that is ‘a small dark blemish on the skin caused by a high concentration of melanin’ (COED). An additional meaning derived from this one is ‘polka dot’, that is, ‘one of a number of round spots that form a pattern, especially on cloth used for clothing’ (DOCE). For example, un vestido de lunares is a polka-dot dress.

Another set of cognate words derived from the word luna, are the adjectives Eng. lunatic and Sp. lunático/a. These words are taken from Late Latin lūnātĭcus ‘moon-struck, crazy, insane’ (fem. lūnātĭca). This Latin word was originally used to refer to people affected by neurological or mental diseases, such as epilepsy and bipolar disorder, which at the time were thought to be caused or somehow affected by the moon. As late as the 18th century, it was still thought that the moon influenced a number of diseases. Lat. lūnātĭcus was primarily an adjective, but it could be used as a noun to refer to a person who was moon-struck or crazy. As for the derivation of the Latin word lūnātĭcus, it has the adjectival suffix ‑ic‑ that we have seen before, but it also has the ‑āt‑ suffix associated with the first conjugation verbs’ passive participle (and supine) stems. However, the morpheme complex ‑ā‑t‑ĭ‑c‑(us/a) came to be used as an extended suffix that formed adjectives from nouns indicating some kind of a relation or action to the meaning from that noun.[1]

Sp. lunático/a is first attested in the 13th century and it is an obvious loanword from Latin (if it was a patrimonial word, it would be *lunazgo). English got this word either directly from Latin or through Old French lunatique ‘insane’ as an adjective in the 13th century, and it is attested as a noun a hundred years later. This word replaced the native Old English word monseoc, which literally meant ‘moon-sick’, based on the same principle. The main collocations using the word lunatic in English are lunatic asylum, a dated word for a psychiatric hospital, and lunatic fringe, a phrase coined by President Theodore Roosevelt in his autobiography (1913), which has come to be used to refer to ‘the members of a usually political or social movement espousing extreme, eccentric, or fanatical views’ (AHD).

 By replacing the ‑tic suffix of lunatic with the Latinate suffix ‑cy that is associated with abstract nouns, English developed the noun lunacy /ˈlun.ə.si/ in the 16th century. At first it referred to ‘the condition of being a lunatic’, i.e. insanity, though now it refers more to ‘behavior that is stupid or crazy’ (OALD) and is thus a synonym of madness. This word is often found collocated with the modifier sheer. The Latinate suffix ‑cy in English came along French words and it stems ultimately from Latin ‑cia or ‑tia, or its Greek cognates ‑κια (-kia) or ‑τια (-tia), e.g. infancy, accuracy, efficiency, solvency, and redundancy. Unlike in the case of lunacy, the suffix ‑cy typically alternates with the ending ‑t(e) of related adjectives (cf. infant, accurate, efficient, solvent, redundant).

Eng. Monday

As we said earlier, the English names for the days of the week are mostly calques or loan translations of the Latin names. Eng. Monday /ˈmʌn.deɪ̯/, comes from Old English Monandæg, among other spellings, which meant literally ‘Moon’s day or ‘day of the Moon’. The parts of this compound were monan, the genitive case wordform of móna ‘moon’ and dæg (dæᵹ) ‘day’. This name is an obvious calque of Latin diēs lunae, with the same meaning.

[GO TO PART 4]

---

[1] Thus, for example, from the noun via ‘road, path’ (vi‑a), the word ‎viāticus ‘related to a journey or travel’ (vi‑ā‑t‑ĭ‑c‑us). The neuter form of these adjectives was often turned into a noun, e.g. viāticum, which is the source of Sp. viático (learned) and viaje ‘trip, travel’ (Catalan loanword). Actually, Spanish words in ‑aje and English words in ‑age come from Late Latin words with the extended suffix ‑āticum, cf. Part II, Chapter 16.