deracinate

[Wilson Gray]

On Nov 18, 2004, at 9:01 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: deracinate
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>
> 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",

Actually, the root is "radic-."  "Radix," i.e. "radic-s," is the
nominative case.

> not "rax", so wouldn't it be (at worst) "deradix(in)ate"?

Nope. It would be "deradic(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
>

The lack of a classical education? A wild guess? The feeling that,
inasmuch as no one studies Latin anymore, one can fake it?

-Wilson Gray