tgpedersen wrote:
> Different strokes for different folks. I look forward to the
> reference.
I've got it. It turns out however that, fascinating as the article is,
it doesn't contain all I promised it would (see below). Anyway, here's
the full reference:
Southern, Mark R.V. 2000. Caribbean Creoles as a convergence conduit:
English _boss_ and _overseer_; Ndjuká _basía_, Sranan _basja_, Jamaican
_busha_, and Dutch _baas(-je)_. _Folia Linguistica Historica XXI/1-2_,
pp. 189-246.
What I remembered best from the article was Southern's long and
_masterly_ demonstration (using linguistic as well as documentary and
socio-historical data) that Mod.Eng. boss (with its range of meanings in
early 19th-c. American English) developed as a result of convergence
between two accidentally similar words: Dutch baas 'master' (plus its
diminutive baasje), and English-based Creole basja 'overseer of slaves'
< *(o)basía <-- Eng. overseer. Hence the sudden change of its
connotations from socially prestigious (expert craftsmen, ship's
captains) to "lowlife" (gangsters, corrupt politicians) upon its
emergence in US English. The argument is very persuasive and tries to
capture every detail of the problem -- note the length of the article,
including a fifteen-page-long bibilography.
Southern has little to say about the ultimate origin of
Dutch/Platdeutsch baas. Let me simply quote the relevant paragraphs (pp.
190-191).
Piotr
--------
1.2. Dutch origins
The only reasonable etymology currently available tends to be dismissed
in the etymological sources as questionable. The Dutch and Platdeutsch
word <baas>, defined by Kiliaan in 1599 as 'head of household, master of
the house' ('_paterfamilias_'), reflects a late and rarely attested
Middle Dutch baes (Verwijs and Verdam _MnW_, M. de Vries and KLuyver
_WNT_, J. de Vries _NEW_ s.v.) beside Frisian baes 'master', and
indicates a pre-form *basa. At this stage most handbooks and
dictioneries refuse to speculate about any earlier antecedents, other
than hesitatingly citing a possible link to OHG basa/wasa 'paternal
aunt' via MHG base 'aunt, female cousin', MLG and NLG (Platdeutsch)/MG
wase (and in dialects such as Schwäbish, meaning any female relative,
including 'niece'), a connection that may be borne out by contemporary
German dialectal address-forms <Base>, <Bäsel>, and <Baas> for women
(Kluge 1995: 54). The German words are in turn derived by Bugge (1888:
175-176, accepted as plausible by Kluge) as a nursery-word from putative
Verner's Law outcome [*]badurswéso: of an underlying protoform
*faþurswéso:, itself pointing to a likely enough IE collocation
*ph2tr-swéso: (for *ph2tr-swésor-s) 'father's sister'. But M. de Vries
and Kluyver (_WNT_ 1898: 2/1.836-840), for example, remain unconvinced
by the <basa> ~ <baas> equation, objecting that [*]-swéso: can only
explain the <-s-> in the f. word <basa>. They prefer to say only that
the two West Germanic words _might_ both be derived from a compound
built to the Proto-Germanic word for 'father'. The semantic leap from
'aunt, female relative' to 'chief' entailed by the implicit female >
male switch certainly poses problems.
Even Kluge admits the linguistic difficulties presented by the initial
consonant (<basa/base> [HG b-]/wase [LG w-] vs. <baas> [Du. and LG b-])
and by the two words' divergent geographical distributions, and
therefore ultimately rejects the <Base> ~ <baas> linkage. J. de Vries'
absolute skepticism on this point (calling it "extremely uncertain") has
already been mentioned [in section 1.1 of Southern's article -- Piotr].
For him, the origins of an implicit *basa form remain doubtful ("de
herkomst in het duister ligt", _NEW_ 1971, explicitly rejecting the the
nursery-word _Koseform/Kosename_ hypothesis echoed by Hellquist 1939: 56
and others). This position is typically adopted elsewhere as well, for
example in English-focused sources such as the _OED_, Onions 1966, and
Barnhart 1995 (s.v.).
--------
P.