etymology of trouver

[Robert R. Ratcliffe]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
re Arabic vs. Latin origin of troubador, troubar, Kevin Tuite wrote:

The proposed antecedent *tropare is not attested in Latin, but neither
is there any compelling evidence that any derivative of either Arabic
root was borrowed into medieval Hispano-Romance.
.............
This isn't quite right.

It may well be that nationalism or linguistic purism has hindered the
search for Arabic etymologies of Ibero-Romance words, but there is
another problem as well, which is the slow pace of historical and
historical linguistic research on Arabic. Arabic dictionaries
traditionally are ahistorical and anetymological. They simply throw
together all attested senses of a word without indication of where and
when they were attested. Using such sources has led to unreliable
etymological proposals, and rightly led to scepticism.  In order to
evaluate the likelihood of borrowing in a contact situtation, you have
to know about the specific form of Arabic spoken in the specific time
and place where the contact took place. Since 1977 Frederico Corriente
and his students have done much to establish the characteristics of
Andalusi Arabic. Any proposals before that should be regarded with
scepticism. For example, Lemay's proposal of D.arab as a source for
troubar is untenable because D. becomes d or ld in Spanish, not t, and
because the semantics don't fit. T.arab, on the other hand, is the
normal word for "sing, recite, perform musically" in old Arabic, for
example in the Kitaab al-'aghaaniiy (book of songs, 9th century). tarab
is attested as the normal word for music in Andalusi Arabic, and it
comes into various Hispano-Romance languages in the form "tarabilla"
"clapper of a mill." (Corriente 1994).  It's still a stretch,
phonologically from tarab to troubar, and "find" doesnt' come into it at
all. But the word is there-- in the right place at the right time with
the right meaning.

When I was a student by the way, I wondered to my Professor (Franz
Rosenthal), whether this T.arab could be the source of troubador, and he
said no it comes from a Romance verb to find. That seemed to be a
stretch semantically, but now I learn there is no such Romance verb (or
at least no Latin verb) my scepticism has increased.

In short while the older generation of Romance scholars may have had bad
reasons for rejecting some proposed Arabic etymologies, they also had a
good one-- the purely speculative nature of most of the proposals made.
Now, in light of the great advancement in research in Arabic dialects
and medieval Arabic in the last thirty years, it might be a good time
for Arabists and Romance specialists to get together to re-evaluate some
of these older problems and proposals. Conference, anyone?

refs.

Corriente, Frederico. 1994. "Current State of Research in the Field of
Andalusi Arabic" in Eid, Cantarino, Walters, ed. Perspectives on Arabic
LInguistics VI. Amsterdam. Benjamins.

___.1977. A grammatical Sketch of the Spanish Arabic Dialect Bundle.
Madrid. Instituto Hispano-Arabe de Cultura.

____________________________________
*NEW E-mail address: ratcliffe at tufs.ac.jp*

Robert R. Ratcliffe
Associate Professor, Arabic and Linguistics
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Asahi-machi 3-11-1, Fuchu-shi, Tokyo 183-8534 Japan