Lecture | Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars
Cruces etymologicae: New etymologies of some old Latin words
- Date
- Friday 14 March 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.27
Abstract
It is surprising that some quite common Latin words still do not have viable Proto-Indo-European etymologies according to the relevant etymological dictionaries (Walde & Hofmann 1938, Ernout & Meillet 1967, de Vaan 2008), although nothing suggests that they are loanwords from some non-IE sources. This paper will address that issue by offering new etymologies of such Latin words as nota ‘mark, note’, herba ‘small plant, grass’, naucum ‘worthless thing', fullō 'fuller’, tardus ‘slow’, hebēs ‘blunt, weak’, laetus ‘joyful’, and ranceō ‘to rot’. We will use the data from large databases of historically attested semantic changes (e.g. https://datsemshift.ru/) and typologies of cross-linguistic colexifications (e.g. https://clics.clld.org/) which have made it possible to assess the probability of semantic changes that particular etymologies presuppose.