[Lexicog] fuego etymology

[Kenneth C. Hill]

(Note that I have corrected the heading of this thread to "fuego".)

I'm afraid that hawk and halcón are only coincidentally similar. Halcón
(and English falcon) are from Latin falco(n-) (< IndoEuropean *pel-
according to the American Heritage Dictionary) while hawk is from Old
English hafoc (< IE *kap-).

Spanish abounds in doublets regarding the development of Latin f- to h- or
not, e.g., humo 'smoke', fumo 'I smoke'. There are many reasons for this,
including learned borrowings from Latin. I think the major source of many
of the doublets is borrowing between closely related dialects. The dialect
of Asturias, for example, shares with standard Castilian the
diphthongization of Romance open e and o to ie and ue, but it retains
initial f-.

"Castilian", for those on this list not familiar with this terminology, is
identical with "Spanish". Castilian was declared the official language of
Spain -- and therefore "Spanish" -- back in the fifteenth century,
possibly in the watershed year 1492, the year of the conquest of Granada,
the expulsion of the Jews, the first voyage of Columbus, and -- most
significantly for our list -- the publication of Nebrija's influential
grammar of Castilian/Spanish, the earliest grammar of a modern European
language. The term castellano 'Castilian' is still used as a synonym of
español 'Spanish' and it is conventional to use the term "Castilian"
rather than "Spanish" when dealing with varieties of language in Spain.

An excellent reference is A History of the Spanish Language, Second
edition, by Ralph Penny (2002), Cambridge University Press.

--Ken

--- David Tuggy <david_tuggy at sil.org> wrote:

> You also get examples like hierro 'iron', fierro '(iron) tool',
> ferreteria 'hardware store', herradura 'horseshoe', etc. The stress and
> diphthongization stuff is relevant to some extent, but not
> determinative. As the example shows, you can get both forms with and
> without stress and a following diphthong. And yes, Spanish has quite a
> few examples of the same Latin root occurring in a much-adapted form, a
> survival or product of centuries of popular use, and a less-adapted
> form, often a later re-borrowing from the Latin of the educated (e.g.
> leche 'milk' lacteos 'milk-derived products').
>
> By the way, it wasn't till I read in Lewis & Clark's journal the
> description of a "halk" in flight that it dawned on me that hawk and
> falcon (Spanish halcón) are related via this same f > h change.
>
> (For any who may not know it, the h in Spanish is not pronounced at all,
> but is a sort of graphic remnant or fossil. The h in the English hawk,
> however, is pronounced.)
>
> --David Tuggy
>



		
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