From: Eric Christopherson (christopea28@uww.edu)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 06:04:31 EST
On Tuesday, April 30, 2002 11:05 pm, Adam Walker wrote:
> Yeah, I think this is definitely what C-o is going to do. Yeah, I like the
> "linda" ambiguity. It could make for some nice poetic twists since linda
> *could* be the word for beautiful in C-o, too. Where does linda come from?
> Beautiful seems to come from a lot of different sources in Romance.
Lindo comes ultimately from Latin LEGITIMU- (accent on the antepenult).
Phonologically, the development was like this:
legitimu > leidmo/lidmo > limdo > lindo.
Semantically, I'm not absolutely sure I remember this correctly, but I think
the word in its feminine forms came to be used of upper-class ladies,
deriving from its sense of "proper." From there it eventually lost both its
class distinction and its emphasis on propriety and shifted to mean simply
pretty or beautiful.
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