From: Christophe Grandsire (christophe.grandsire@free.fr)
Date: Thu Jan 18 2001 - 15:44:01 EST
Hi everyone,
Lately I've been wondering about semantic changes from Proto-Romance to the
different Romance langs. Principally I've been thinking about the different
translations of French "parler": to talk, to speak, in different Romance langs
I know. Thus I found:
French: parler
Italian: parlare
Spanish: hablar
Portuguese: falar
French and Italian seem to derive the verb for "to talk" from the same origin
(I would guess VL *parlare, tell me if I'm wrong. If I'm not, then I would
really like to know what it meant in Latin). For what I know of Spanish and
Portuguese sound changes, they derive their verb from an earlier *fablar that I
would connect with Latin *fabulare (not sure it exists) and fabula, which in
turn gave in French "fable": "(unbelievable) story" and "fabuler": "to tell
unbelievable stories".
The semantic drift that took place in the Ibero-Romance langs is really
interesting (from *fabulare which meant I suppose: "to tell a story", to hablar
and falar: to speak, to talk). The reason why is that I want to fill Narbonósc
with plausible but unusual semantic drifts, so that words in Narbonósc that are
cognates with words in other Romance langs won't always have the same meaning,
but rather a different, even if related, meaning.
Right now I have two interesting semantic drifts in Narbonósc:
- hom and fêne (from Latin hominem and femina) don't mean simply "man"
and "woman" but rather "male human being" and "female human being", i.e. they
are rather biological terms. To refer to people, you use dom: "man", "Mr" and
dône: "woman", "Ms" (from dominus and domina). And there are also the versatile
douem and douêne (same origin as dom and dône, but for a reason the sound
changes were a little different).
- mãg (from Latin magnus, and more exactly its adverbial form magne) has taken
the place of multus and means "a lot", "many", "much". In the same fashion,
poev (from Latin parve) has taken the place of pauci and means "few", "little".
Their respective comparatives mais and mins are particular in that it's
impossible to know whether they come from the comparative forms of magnus and
parvus (majus and minus) or from the comparative forms of multus and pauci
(magis and I think minus). Multus and pauci didn't disappear completely, but
their forms in Narbonósc (mout /mu/ and pauc /po/) have changed meaning (and
use) completely and are used in very particular environments, always negative.
What I would like to know is if in your own Romance conlangs you have also
funny, unusual or interesting semantic drifts, and if you know some interesting
ones in Romance natlangs. I need all the material you can find to get some
inspiration and especially to know what's possible and what's not in diachronic
semantics.
Thank you in advance.
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
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