Exercise in creative etymology
Jan. 27th, 2014 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomSo, this (lightly edited) happened on Facebook today:
a friend: I can't figure out "nachii". From nacho? (Which I would parse nacho, nachare?)
me: Well, nacho is obviously the ablative.
a friend: It's only the ablative if the singular is "nachus." I refuse. It sounds like a terrible nose infection. Besides, Aaron, are you saying you don't want to be able to say "mirabile nachu"?
me:
Nāchus 'terrible nose infection' must originate in Greek as νᾶχος. This is a compound: the first element is the familiar Indo-European stem *nas- 'nose', otherwise unattested in Greek (but cf. English nose, Latin nāsus, Sanskrit nás, etc.). The second element is IE *h2egh- 'afraid, depressed', attested as a noun in Greek as ἄχος 'pain'. This compound gives us pre-Greek *nás-akhos 'nose pain'; with the regular deletion of intervocalic *s in Greek and coalescence of the two a's into long ā, we get νᾶχος.
On the other hand, the nachū in mīrābile nachū, referring to the snack food, is all Latin. This fourth-declension word is formed on the same lines as gradus 'step', but derived from IE *h1neḱ-, meaning 'bring'. By regular sound change the zero-grade of such a stem would come out in Latin as inc-, but a frequent analogical change in Italic was to re-form a zero-grade stem so as to have a as a medial vowel, patterning after stems that had had medial laryngeals. (The same happened in the zero-grades gradus and magnus; we can compare mag-nus, with the reshaped zero grade, to its synonym ing-ēns, with the original zero grade). The deverbal suffix -u- gives us nacus, ablative nacū, '(the act of) bringing'; the meaning changed by the usual metonymy to refer to 'that which is brought'—namely nachos. The h in the spelling is a spurious Classical-era insertion via hypercorrection, the same way pulcer became pulcher.
(...Never let it be said I don't spend my afternoons doing linguistics.)
a friend: I can't figure out "nachii". From nacho? (Which I would parse nacho, nachare?)
me: Well, nacho is obviously the ablative.
a friend: It's only the ablative if the singular is "nachus." I refuse. It sounds like a terrible nose infection. Besides, Aaron, are you saying you don't want to be able to say "mirabile nachu"?
me:
Nāchus 'terrible nose infection' must originate in Greek as νᾶχος. This is a compound: the first element is the familiar Indo-European stem *nas- 'nose', otherwise unattested in Greek (but cf. English nose, Latin nāsus, Sanskrit nás, etc.). The second element is IE *h2egh- 'afraid, depressed', attested as a noun in Greek as ἄχος 'pain'. This compound gives us pre-Greek *nás-akhos 'nose pain'; with the regular deletion of intervocalic *s in Greek and coalescence of the two a's into long ā, we get νᾶχος.
On the other hand, the nachū in mīrābile nachū, referring to the snack food, is all Latin. This fourth-declension word is formed on the same lines as gradus 'step', but derived from IE *h1neḱ-, meaning 'bring'. By regular sound change the zero-grade of such a stem would come out in Latin as inc-, but a frequent analogical change in Italic was to re-form a zero-grade stem so as to have a as a medial vowel, patterning after stems that had had medial laryngeals. (The same happened in the zero-grades gradus and magnus; we can compare mag-nus, with the reshaped zero grade, to its synonym ing-ēns, with the original zero grade). The deverbal suffix -u- gives us nacus, ablative nacū, '(the act of) bringing'; the meaning changed by the usual metonymy to refer to 'that which is brought'—namely nachos. The h in the spelling is a spurious Classical-era insertion via hypercorrection, the same way pulcer became pulcher.
(...Never let it be said I don't spend my afternoons doing linguistics.)
