Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART ONE LATIN
- PART TWO THE ROMANCE VOCABULARY
- 7 The Lexicon in General; Shifts in the Meaning of Words
- 8 Changes in the Form of Words
- 9 When Words Collide
- 10 Immigrants
- PART THREE PROTO-ROMANCE, OR WHAT THE LANGUAGES SHARE
- PART FOUR EARLIEST TEXTS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS, OR WHERE THE LANGUAGES DIVERGE
- Suggestions for Further Reading
- General Index
- Index of English Words
8 - Changes in the Form of Words
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART ONE LATIN
- PART TWO THE ROMANCE VOCABULARY
- 7 The Lexicon in General; Shifts in the Meaning of Words
- 8 Changes in the Form of Words
- 9 When Words Collide
- 10 Immigrants
- PART THREE PROTO-ROMANCE, OR WHAT THE LANGUAGES SHARE
- PART FOUR EARLIEST TEXTS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS, OR WHERE THE LANGUAGES DIVERGE
- Suggestions for Further Reading
- General Index
- Index of English Words
Summary
Words, then, certainly do shift their meanings. Words often also change their form, their outward appearance, in one way or another, and in that new form sometimes they retain their earlier meanings, sometimes they acquire new ones. In surveying now the changes of this sort that took place, it makes sense to continue limiting the examples to words that entered the Romance languages from Latin, because the latter already possessed a considerable variety of means for creating fresh word forms. With vocabulary, as with other features, Latin provided not only the model of a language that could change and grow, but also the blueprints and the tools for the process.
NOUNS
Nouns from Adjectives
Sometimes an adjective is so regularly attached to a noun by speakers that it begins to represent the entire phrase, eventually becoming a noun in its own right; this might be more exactly described as a change in part of speech than a change in form. We have already seen that in certain regions, after Latin caseum “cheese” gave way to the phrase caseum formaticum “cheese made in a mold,” the adjective formaticum alone came to represent the phrase, in the end turning into the noun that named the food. Similarly, and with a startling shift of reference, the Latin phrase iecur ficatum got reduced to ficatum, now meaning “liver.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Latin AliveThe Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages, pp. 144 - 157Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010