Yong Huang's Blog: Learning Spanish, French, and Italian Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics, page 2

Try interpreting new words literally first

There are many words in Spanish, French, and Italian that look like or indeed are cognate with their English counterparts. After all, a great deal of Latin and then French words entered English in its history. As a result, we have a tendency to try understanding these words as in English, but occasionally they turn out to have different nuances of meaning or be outright false friends because they have semantically evolved too far apart. One curious fact is that in these cases, it is often the English word that has drifted away from its literal sense more than the Romance language word. Here let's look at some example headword entries in my vocabulary books of Spanish, French, and Italian.

Spanish eventual possible, contingent. In spite of cognation, this word is not the same as English eventual (“final”, “at the end of events”); consider them false friends. If you see it used that way, it is Anglicized Spanish. Spanish eventual is more closely related to event in the sense of “in case a certain event happens”; it’s helpful to try interpreting this word literally focusing on the root, event. Examples, eventuales / posibles cambios (“possible changes”); personal eventual (“temporary personnel”).

Similarly, French éventuel possible, prospective, likely or expected to happen. éventuellement possibly, maybe. Cognate with eventual. In spite of cognation, éventuel does not mean “eventual” (“final”, “at the end of events”), and éventuellement could mean “eventually” only in Quebec French presumably influenced by English; consider them false friends. French éventuel is more literal, more closely related to event in the sense of “in case a certain event happens”. Example, les conséquences éventuelles (“the possible consequences”).

Italian eventuale possible, contingent, potential, possibile. This word is not the same as English eventual (“final”, “at the end of events”); we may consider them false friends. Italian eventuale is more literal and more closely related to event in the sense of “in case a certain event happens”. This is also true to Spanish eventual and French éventuel. Example, le eventuali / possibili conseguenze (“possible consequences”).

Spanish procurar to try to, to attempt, intentar; to procure. From Latin procurare (“to manage”). The root is cognate with curate, cure. Note the first meaning. Try to understand the word literally: a museum curator curates or manages the museum, and pro- means “forward” (think of forward thinking or intending).

Spanish conformar to shape, to form, to make up; to be content with, to settle for, to conform. The first meaning is literal; think of formar or English form. The second meaning is not quite the same as English conform. Examples, conformar un equipo (“to form a team / group”); los países que conforman OTAN son ... (“the countries that make up NATO are ...”).

Spanish disgusto displeasure, annoyance. In spite of cognation or definitions in some dictionaries, this word does not really mean “disgust” or “disgusting”. Consider them false friends, and use Spanish asco to translate English disgust. The meaning of disgusto is easy to remember as you can simply negate (dis-) the meaning of the root, gusto (“pleasure”).

French sensible sensitive (cognate). insensible insensitive (cognate). Also cognate with sensible, insensible. In spite of cognation, these French (as well as Spanish by the way) words do not mean the same as English sensible and insensible, which would be raisonnable (“reasonable”) and déraisonnable (“unreasonable”), respectively. To help remember the difference, note that French sensible, meaning “able to sense or feel (something minute or fine)”, is more literal while the English word is more figurative or indirect. Examples, une personne / un sujet très sensible (“a very sensitive person / topic”); le matériau est sensible à la température (“the material is temperature sensitive”).

French émaner to come from, to emanate (cognate). While English emanate also means “to come from”, it’s often used literarily on something abstract. This French word is less literary and more literal.

Italian profondo deep, profound, fondo. While English profound is used figuratively, this Italian word most of the time means literally “deep”, and is more common than the adjective fond, which more often is a noun. Example, acque profonde (“deep water / waters”; the Italian phrase in plural is more common than the singular).

I don't have a good explanation why the English words are less literal in most of these cases. It is just my observation after working on lexicography of thousands of words in these languages in the past seven or so years.

In addition, trying to literally interpret the words you are not familiar with is a necessary step in learning. When you see French il s’agit de, read it like “it acts upon itself regarding”, and then you can remember the good translation “it’s about / all about” much more easily, e.g. il s’agit de votre santé (“it’s about / all about your health”).

Words meaning "four", "fourth", "square" etc.

It's easy to confuse a group of Spanish, French and Italian words meaning "four", "fourth", "square" etc. The following are a few of them with relatively high frequency.

English ............... Spanish ....... French ................ Italian
four ..................... cuatro ......... quatre ................. quattro
fourth (ordinal) . cuarto ......... quatrième .......... quarto
square (shape) .. cuadrado .... carré .................... quadrato
painting .............. cuadro ........ [different word] . quadro

If traced to Proto-Indo-European, they are all cognates. But in Latin, or even within PIE, they already differentiated. For example, although Spanish cuadrado and cuadro are very close (even in Latin, where the former is just a participle of the latter), they have different etymons in Latin from those of cuatro and cuarto. In fact, cuarto, which has /r/ sound in the first syllable, is clearly different from all the other three. Regardless etymology, what tricks can we come up with to remember these words without confusing them? Since cuarto is very different due to its early letter r, you may make use of that fact. But the English equivalents have r everywhere (except in painting). One trick that does work is to notice the similarity between cuarto and English quarter. While cuarto can mean ordinal "fourth", it actually can also mean "one-fourth", which is exactly what quarter means. Then note that both cuadrado and English quandrant are mathematical concepts, so the meaning "square" of the former becomes obvious. Numeral cuatro is too frequent to require a mnemonic (i.e. rote memory suffices). The only one left is cuadro, which actually has a fairly high frequency so a mnemonic may not be needed, either.

Among the French words, quatrième is easy since suffix -ième obviously indicates an ordinal, hence "fourth". As to carré, some memory experts such as Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas, the authors of The Memory Book, most likely would encourage you to think of a gigantic square-shaped car, because the evoked image is provocative and logically improbable and so easy to remember. It may work in this case.

The Italian words are very similar to the Spanish. The most important difference is the first letter q instead of c. Since Italian is the most conservative in sound change from Latin among Romance languages according to historical linguists (e.g. Martin Maiden, the author of A Linguistic History of Italian) and the Latin etymons of these words start with q, it's understandable that these Italian words start with it, too.

Semantic distances among languages

Linguists Ana Sabina Uban and others in their article "Cross-lingual laws of semantic change" have a table of Average cross-lingual similarity between cognates (see N. Tahmasebi et al. (ed), Computational approaches to semantic change, p.232)

______Fr____It___Pt___Ro___En___La
Es_ 0.64_0.67_0.68_0.57_0.61_0.42
Fr_______0.64_0.61_0.55_0.60_0.40
It_____________0.65_0.57_0.60_0.41
Pt_________________ 0.56_0.59_0.42
Ro______________________ 0.53_0.40
En____________________________0.40


This means that Spanish and Portuguese, no surprise!, are the closest in terms of cognates (with a similarity score of 0.68), followed by Spanish and Italian (0.67), Italian and Portuguese (0.65), Spanish and French (0.64). The farthest is between Latin and French or Romanian or English (0.40). Although English is a language not even belonging to the Romance group, the cognate similarity between English and Spanish or French or Italian or Portuguese is greater than that between Romanian (obviously a Romance language) and the other Romance languages.

Spanish presa, preso, prisa

It may be easy to confuse these Spanish words:
presa dam; prey
preso prisoner
prisa hurry

The key is to realize that presa is from Latin prensa, from prehendere (“to seize”, “to catch”), cognate with the root of apprehend, comprehend. A prey is what is caught, and a dam is to catch and hold water. The related preso means “prisoner”, of which presa can be the feminine form (“female prisoner”). To help remember presa means “dam” while preso means “prisoner”, as a mnemonic, consider that a prisoner is more likely male than female and a dam makes a beautiful scene for tourists.

On the other hand, in prisa (“hurry”), from Latin pressus ("pressed"), the vowel is i, from e of the Latin word. Sound change is like following a rule of minimum change. For example, e in Latin prensa didn't change to i because that would involve two changes: loss of n and e > i, so it stopped at e. But if it was originally e as in pressus, it could change to i.

Spanish tarea and English mattress

We know many Arabic words entered Spanish as a result of centuries of Arabic or Moors' occupation of the Iberian peninsula. It is common to have Arabic loan words in Spanish beginning with al or a, e.g. almacén ("store", "warehouse"), alcalde ("mayor"), aceite ("oil"), etc. In many of these words, if they are nouns, the Arabic definite article ال, usually transliterated as al but sometimes as a- depending on the first consonant following it, is treated as part of the word and enters Spanish vocabulary together with the stem of the word. If this were not the case, Spanish aceite (from Arabic الزيت (az-zayt) for example would really be *ceite instead.

At least one word, though, is not easy to explain. Spanish tarea ("task") is from Arabic طرح (ṭaraḥa, "to throw"), which English mattress is also borrowed from. But tarea and mattress sound completely different. How could they ever have any connection? Here lies a little semantic gem in Arabic vocabulary. If a word begins with م (ma), it probably means "place". So mattress or its Arabic etymon مطرح (maṭraḥ) really means "place where something is thrown". If we strip this prefix ma-, if we may call it a prefix, the meaning is related to "throwing", which is some work or endeavor, which is task. So the connection is between -tre- of mattress (i.e. ṭraḥ in Arabic) and tarea. They still don't sound alike I agree. But that's as close as we can get to.

action, acción, azione, "share of stock"

French action, Spanish acción, Italian azione, all mean "action", but also "share" as in "share of stock" in finance. This sense is not easily connected to the sense of "action". How did the word acquire this sense? So far, I only found one dictionary that seems to allude to it. In Albert Dauzat, Jean Dubois, and Henri Mitterand Nouveau dictionnaire étymologique et historique, publishe in 1971, under the headword action, we see "sens financier, action d'une société, 1669 (Colbert), peut-être calque du néerl. aktie, vulgarisé au XVIIIe s., avec le développement du crédit." I don't know what "Colbert" means as the dictionary fails to list. But it probably refers to a historical document written by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), who became the Secretary of State of the Navy of France in 1669. The dictionary indicates that this financial sense of action first appeared in that document, referring to a share of a company, and the word may be a calque of Dutch aktie, popularized in the 18th century with development of credit. The Dutch word is now written as actie, which according to Wiktionary, means "(finance, archaic, historical) share in an enterprise", and is ultimately from Latin āctiō (“action”).

If we only care about morphology of the word, as most etymological dictionaries do, saying French action, Spanish acción, Italian azione, as well as Dutch actie or aktie, come from Latin actio is fine. But often times we also care about sense development or semantic evolution of a word. Unfortunately, most dictionaries keep quiet about it. Here we find that the sense of "share of stock" of this word in Romance languages comes from Dutch as a calque and may be from a 1669 document. But I don't know which specific document it is, so the semantic connection between "action" and "share" is more or less still a missing link. I'll keep this in mind and will continue to search for an answer.

Latin sentire ("to feel") diverges in Romance languages

From the same Latin etymon sentire ("to feel", "to perceive"):

French sentir mostly means "to feel", "to smell".
Spanish sentir mostly means "to feel", "to hear".
Italian sentire mostly means "to feel", "to hear", "to smell".
Some dictionaries list other meanings, e.g. Italian sentire could also mean "to taste", etc. but I only list the most common meanings here.

It is interesting that different Romance languages extend the sense of the Latin word to different sense organs, if we only count the common meanings. French sentir can mean "smell" but not "hear", Spanish sentir can mean "hear" but not "smell", while Italian sentire can mean both. Again, just the most common meanings (other than "feel"). If you want a mnemonic to remember the differences, imagine a Frenchman good at smelling fragrance because he's a romantic lover and smelling good food because he's a gourmet eater, a Spaniard capable of hearing faint sounds from afar since he has the gene from his ancestors with this skill when they were on the formidable Armada, while an Italian excels at smelling as he is both a romantic lover and a first-class chef, and has acute hearing as a result of constant exposure to grand operas.

Word for "people" in Romance languages can be singular

English people, as well as peoples, is a plural word. The Spanish, French, and Italian words that translate this English word may be grammatically singular depending on which word you use, even though their meanings always imply plural.

French:
gens: Plural, e.g. les gens qui se lèvent tôt ("the people that get up early"). While cognate with Spanish singular word gente, this word is plural.
peuple: Singular, e.g. le peuple sud-américain (“the south American people”); le peuple élu (“the chosen people”). This word is used instead of gens in a context of ethnic or religious significance.

Spanish:
gente: Singular, e.g. la gente que se levanta temprano ("the people that get up early"). While cognate with French plural word gens, this word is singular.
pueblo: Singular, e.g. el pueblo mexicano ("the Mexican people").

Italian:
gente: Singular, e.g. la gente che si alza presto ("the people that get up early"). While cognate with French plural word gens, this word is singular. Well, this example is sort of contrived in that it may be more natural to say le persone che si alzano presto instead. This is opposite to English convention; we say people more than persons in this case.
popolo: Singular, e.g. il popolo degli Stati Uniti ("the people of the United States").

In short, the words corresponding to or cognate with English people, i.e. French peuple, Spanish pueblo, and Italian popolo, are all singular in the three Romance languages. In the case of the words cognate with English gentle or gentile, French gens is plural while Spanish and Italian gente is singular.

French 'orphelin', Spanish 'huérfano', or Italian 'orfano'

French orphelin, Spanish huérfano, or Italian orfano is translated into English as orphan. If you read the Wiktionary pages written in their respective language, such as the French page for orphelin, and the Spanish page for huérfano, you'll see that the word can refer to a child even if he or she has lost only one parent; "[q]ui a perdu son père et sa mère, ou l’un des deux" and "[d]icho de un infante, que ha perdido uno o ambos progenitores", respectively. On the Italian page for orfano, however, there is no such indication. So it prompted me to think maybe the Italian word is like English orphan, which denotes a child both of whose parents have died. (If only one parent has died, the child cannot be called an orphan.)

I posted this question to a Facebook polyglots group. The tens of replies from fellow polyglots can be summarized in two points:

* In quite a number of languages, including French, Spanish and Italian, the word commonly translated as orphan implies that the child has lost both parents. But you can specifically refer to a child that has lost only one parent, e.g. French une orpheline de père, Spanish huérfano de padre, meaning “a fatherless child”. In English, orphan strictly refers to a child with neither father nor mother, so "fatherless child" instead of "orphan of father" is the correct translation.

* In some languages, the situation becomes more interesting. For example, In Arabic, one word refers to a child who has lost his father before puberty, and a relatively rare word to a child who has lost both parents. There are languages that are like English, for example Chinese and Polish, in which the word commonly translated as "orphan" must be one having lost both parents.

The answers in the group also remind us that the definitions in a dictionary are sometimes not completely true to the native speakers' real-life usage. For example, the German page for Waise says "minderjährige Person, die beide Eltern oder eines der Elternteile (durch Tod) verloren hat" ("a minor who has lost both parents or one of the parents (through death)"), and my paperback Duden dictionary says the same. But according to the group, when using the word Waise, people would assume both parents have died, and if not, another word Halbwaise (literally "half-orphan") would be used instead. This highlights the usefulness and importance of usage notes commonly considered dispensable in a typical dictionary that minces words to save space. A book that is dedicated to vocabulary studies but is not a pure dictionary fits the need perfectly.

With that discussion in my mind, I wrote and edited the headword orphelin for my Learning French Words book as follows:

orphelin child who has lost one or both parents; (adj.) of such a child. Cognate with orphan. Note while English orphan refers to a child who has lost both parents, French orphelin (as well as Spanish huérfano or the equivalent word in many other languages) can refer to a child only one of whose parents has died, although the ambiguity depends on the context. Example, une orpheline de père (“a fatherless child”; this is a good phrase to break ambiguity; note translating it as “an orphan of father” would make no sense in English).

Spanish 'terco' ("stubborn")

The Spanish word for "stubborn" can be obstinado, which is easy since we know English obstinate. But there's another word, terco. Wikitionary has a fairly long paragraph about its etymology. But none of the words in this paragraph is helpful to us. On the other hand, we can easily take Turkish or in Spanish turco as a mnemonic. Just say un turco es terco ("a Turkish is stubborn"; by the way, this is only a mnemonic, not a true statement). Easy. Right? But there's something better. Much to my delight, a few decades ago, one linguist wrote a 15-page research article on this topic, The Etymology of Hispanic "terco", where he says (on p578)

"it seems permissible to think of a cross with turch 'Turk, Turkish.' Sp. terco, Cat. enterch were, in general, mostly employed in diatribes against heretics and infidels (including Jews). Since the Turks, at the close of the Middle Ages, had replaced the Saracens as the indomitable opponents of Christianity, the association of enterch with turch was within the realm of possibilities.'

And in a footnote on this page, he adds

"The sweeping association of Turks, the hated infidels par excellence, with an unpleasant trait of human character does not cause surprise."

That is quite gratifying. To me, in reading the article, I mostly care about the semantic association of this Spanish word with turco or the Turkish people. Here it is. This means such an association is not baseless, making my originally pure mnemonic a historically justifiable statement.