Re: Re: deracinate

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 11/18/04 9:01:49 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:


> 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
> 
> 

Thanks for all the help. I'll pass it on to Professor Williams. 'm not sure 
why the Shakespeareans thought "deraxinate" would be the right derivation from 
the Latin. Maybe I misread my colleague's note. What he said to me was "Why 
would Shakespeare have coined a term with a 'c' and not an 'x'?" Maybe what he 
meant was "Why 'deracinate' and not 'deradixate' or 'deradixinate'?"