Re: Re: deracinate

[Wilson Gray]

On Nov 18, 2004, at 9:42 PM, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       RonButters at AOL.COM
> Subject:      =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20=A0=20=A0=20=A0=20Re:=20deracinate?=
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> 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
>>>> Variori=
> um
>>>> Shakespeare, seems surprised that Shakespeare did not borrow the
>>>> Latin=20
>> 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=A0=A0 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" o=
> r
>>> the like doesn't seem right in any language, at a glance.
>>>
>>> -- Doug Wilson
>> =20
>> I don't have my Latin dictionary on me, but two comments:
>> (1)=A0 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)=A0 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.=A0 But why would one ever expect
>> "rax"?
>> =20
>> larry
>> =20
>> =20
>
> Thanks for all the help. I'll pass it on to Professor Williams. 'm not
> sure=20
> why the Shakespeareans thought "deraxinate" would be the right
> derivation fr=
> om=20
> the Latin. Maybe I misread my colleague's note. What he said to me was
> "Why=20
> would Shakespeare have coined a term with a 'c' and not an 'x'?" Maybe
> what=20=
> he=20
> meant was "Why 'deracinate' and not 'deradixate' or 'deradixinate'?"
>

Maybe Shakespeare had a reasonable command of Latin morphology?

-Wilson Gray