[Lexicog] fuego etymology

[Mike Maxwell]

Kenneth C. Hill wrote:
> (Note that I have corrected the heading of this thread to "fuego".)

(was "feugo")  Wretched keyboard.  It's the same reason my keyboard types
"langauge" instead of "language".

I suppose we're getting rather far from lexicography, except that
dictionaries are the traditional place where etymologies (and therefore the
"correct" spelling and meaning) are recorded.  Having said that--

> 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-.

This reminds me of a time not long since when I was called on to teach a
class in the history of English, in a certain university the name whereof I
purposely omit.  I began the semester teaching a little about historical
linguistics, and emphasizing--since I supposed it would be a novel notion
to students steeped in Etymologies and Facts--the Neogrammarians'
Principle, that sound change was exceptionless.

Part way through the semester, I realized that at least for English, there
seemed to be a good many exceptions to every sound change.  The text I was
using attributed these to dialectal mixture, which I suppose is as good a
solution as any.  But it did make me wonder: was the exceptionlessness of
sound change real--like Galileo's equal acceleration of light and heavy
objects--and the exceptions a matter of outside forces?  Or was
exceptionlessness a mirage, an over-generalization that the Neogrammarians
had been able to draw only because they didn't have enough data?

I don't think I mentioned my doubts to the students, who were in any case
amazed to be enrolled in a course which did not call for memorization of
hundreds of facts.  (They were even more dumbfounded when the final exam
was open book.)  I don't know whether they figured out for themselves that
the principle I had stated at the beginning was flawed; maybe some of the
better ones did.

(BTW, there is a brief mention of the non-exceptionlessness of sound change
at http://www.explore-language.com/linguistics/S/Sound_change.html.  The
Internet didn't exist then, and I didn't have access to a good historical
linguistics book that would have set me straight.)

I'd still like to know if there is a known explanation for 'fogon'
(*hogon).  Later borrowing from learned Latin, or from a non f>h dialect?
--
	Mike Maxwell
	Linguistic Data Consortium
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


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