Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE?(Chandro)

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
Date: Monday, May 10, 1999 3:01 PM

>"Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu> wrote:

>>On that note, I'm curious. Miguel, did you come across any reference to a
>>feminine form for <chandro> as "gandul, etc." in the dictionary you are
>>using. What exactly was the source you were using? (Thanks in advance for
>>the bibliographic reference).

>The word does not appear in any of my Spanish dictionaries, or so
>I thought, until I happened to see it in my 1954 (6th) edition of
>the Espasa (Diccionario Enciclope'dico Abreviado):

>CHANDRO. adj. Ar. Perezoso, desalin~ado, holgaza'n.

>[Where Ar. stands for "Aragone's"]

>That's all.  I then did an Altavista search for "chandro", which
>yielded two or three Web pages containing Aragonese vocabularies,
>confirming what the Espasa says, but not adding any further
>information (e.g. about the etymology of the word).  FWIW:

>http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Valley/6243/diccionario.html
>http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Dell/5055/curiosi.html

>It's probably merely a coincidence that, apparently, Chandro is
>also a name to give to your GSD (German Shepherd Dog), as
>officially recognized by the Verein fuer Deutsche Schaeferhunde.

>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

[Ed Selleslagh]
May I suggest another approach that might reconcile both views/facts?

Could it be that 'chandro' is actually derived from Basque 'etxe(ko)andre',
meaning 'lady of the house', and later, in Aragonese dialect, first meant
some figure of authority, then some similar person but one that exploited
his position, and finally anyone with similar behavior?
There is a precedent: 'senyorito': originally the junior master, later the
lazy rich layabout son. 'Caballerito' has a somewhat similar history.

In Dutch, 'knecht' is a male servant, a far cry from 'knight' in English,
but with the same (probably Saxon) origin. In West-Flemish dialect,
'knecht(je)' means a young boy, cf. Eng. 'maid'/'maiden' etc.

This is a very common type of shift, especially when words pass into another
language.  In English e.g., terms of French origin (veal, pork, mutton...)
have a 'nobler' meaning than the Anglo-Saxon/OE original (calf, pig, swine -
the latter actually being of an older, Latin origin, 'suinus', an
adjective - , sheep,...) - or ordinary French for that matter - , because of
well-known historic facts.

Ed.