Re: [tied] husk

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, m_iacomi wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "elmeras2000" wrote:
> >
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "m_iacomi" <m_iacomi@...> wrote:
> > > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex"  wrote:
> >
> > ... an awful lot.
> >
> > But if there is a Romanian word hoaspã 'husk, pod', I find it pretty
> > obvious that it is from Latin hospes, -item 'host'. The semantic
> > development would be much as in German Patrone 'cartridge',
> > ultimately some form of Latin patro:nus. The h- would be a learned
> > restoration.
>
> It can't be. Between lost of aspiration (Ist century BC) and
> reinstance of a similar phoneme supported by Slavic words there
> are at least some seven centuries, it is fairly impossible that
> Romance-speaking people have had some vague idea about an initial
> /h/ over that time and restore it in an unique Latin inherited
> word

That is no obstacle; many French words have spellings of this nature.
The earliest form of ho^te was oste; when h- was reinstated nobody was old
enough to remember any spoken [h-].

-- for the same matter, nobody could teach Romanians about

> that word's Latin spelling: influence of written Medieval Latin
> is pretty missing in the Balkans, our church and court language
> was CS for several other centuries until late shift to Romanian.

I do not think Latin has been an unknown language in the Balkans at any
time. It does not take a unanimous people to dig up a learned word, it
just takes one person who gets the idea and tells it to others.

> And a late loanword from Latin is excluded since the meaning is
> sensibly different. On another hand, one already has "hospes" >
> "oaspe" in Romanian (in parallel with "hospitem" > "oaspete"),
> it would be very strange to have such an inherited doublet.

Re-borrowing of a word is not uncommon, there are many instances of that.
What it takes for the Patrone story to be true is that somebody translates
that from its Latin source meaning 'host' into Romanian and then finds a
way to embellish oasp- so that it looks a bit like Latin hospes. That
would then be the word for 'cartridge', of which 'pod' would be a slightly
metaphorical meaning. The connection between 'husk' and 'pod' is no more
of a problem in this case than it is other way around. I do not know if
there can have been a native variant of the word oaspe that could have
been picked and used in these specialized meanings. But the semantic story
looks so familiar that it might be worth somebody's trouble to follow the
lead.

Jens