deracinate

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:54 PM -0500 11/18/04, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>>According to the OED, the word DERACINATE was apparently coined by
>>Shakespeare, who used it first in Henry V, v,ii, 47. I say the bard
>>borrowed it directly
>>from French; my colleague George Williams, who is working on the Variorium
>>Shakespeare, seems surprised that Shakespeare did not borrow the Latin form,
>>which would be DERAXINATE. I will leave it to the Shakespeareans to
>>figure out
>>which is most likely from the point of view of the bard's mind and track
>>record.
>>But what   am wondering is as follows:
>>
>>1. Does anyone have an antedating to the 1599 Shakespeare quote?
>>2. Does DERAXINATE feel as unlikely to ADS-ers as it does to me?
>
>1. No, but apparently the French verb dates from the 13th century.
>
>2. A Latin equivalent also exists in English: "eradicate". "Deraxinate" or
>the like doesn't seem right in any language, at a glance.
>
>-- Doug Wilson

I don't have my Latin dictionary on me, but two comments:
(1)  as I recall, the Latin root for root, radish, etc. is "radix",
not "rax", so wouldn't it be (at worst) "deradix(in)ate"?
(2)  in any case, the stem for Romance (and hence English) formations
from Latin is typically not the nominative form but the oblique
(genitive/accusative/dative/ablative), which here is "radic-".
Checking AHD4, I find that in fact there was a Late Latin
reconstruction of the noun based on that stem, viz. "ra:dici:na".
Thus we have radical, radish, eradicate (as Doug mentions), etc. and
not radixal, radix, eradixate, etc.  But why would one ever expect
"rax"?

larry