--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Max Dashu <maxdashu@...> wrote:
>
> Thanks much for this. What is the publication you are citing?
>
> Max
>
I was citing his
Diccionari etimològic. (The complete name of the work is of course longer:
Diccionari etimològic i complementari de la llengua catalana). It was published from 1980 to 1992 in nine volumes, plus one index volume locating the 280,000-plus lexical entries (by "lexical" I mean of course "not considering morphological, phonetic or dialectal variants"). It was printed by Curial, a Catalan publisher. The nine pages I cited on
bruc and
bruixa begin at page 283 of volume 2.
More information on these two items (especially on
bruc and its variants and derivatives) can also be surely found in his
Onomasticon Cataloniae (eight volumes, published 1997, same publisher), an almost-posthumous work (Coromines died in 1997). Though he deals in it with
place-names exclusively, considerable complementary information is found there: I located myself, in a superficial browsing of the index, more than twenty toponymical referenced pages to the
bruc family
- as well as a dozen placenames containing the witch word
- covering the whole Catalan domain (which is as you know rather
vast, as it includes territories in four states
- from [present] Spain to Andorra, France and [insular] Italy- yet
surprisingly uniform and well-studied).
I'm ready to add that
- besides the usual linguist's staple (Greek, Latin, "PIE", Germanic, Celtic, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic
, etc.)- Coromines had perfect command of Occitan (particularly Gascon) and Basque, all Ibero- and Galloromance dialects as well as of Mossarabic and even of Vulgar Iberian Arab (with dialects), to cite a few. He wrote a study of the Aranese (Gascon), a historical grammar of the Catalan spoken in the [now French] Rosselló (Roussillon) and
- while at Chicago
- a comprehensive (four heavy volumes) authoritative etymological dictionary of Spanish (including all the American variants).
I save message space by responding here now to another post that was received today:
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Clayton Cardoso" <entrelenga@...>
>brux-
>- root, of unknown origin, according to Coromines, but surely
>pre-Roman, perhaps through a Latin form *brúxa or *brouxa; Said Ali,
>however, had earlier admitted in Investigações Filológicas (1975, p.
>257), very convincingly, that it stems from the Latin happax
>plusscìa/pluscìa, that occurs in the discourse of Trimalchio, and he
>believes that the Portuguese form bruxa is earlier than the Spanish
>form bruja and source of it (...).
Here the author clearly refers to Coromines and seems to cite him as an authority on the "bruxa" word. He has a right to do it, BUT I must warn you of the idiosyncratic and extralinguistic fact, possibly not widely known, that Coromines fastidiously
updated, revised and/or reconsidered ALL his previous work (on
bruc,
bruixa or ANY other item whatsoever) in the two
magna opera I cited. These two linguistic monuments represent a rare late-life lucid and combative synthesis-cum-meditation revision of his
whole work. Thus, any previous thoughts he could have entertained (say, in 1975 or before) on any of them must be considered, according to his stated wishes, revised and
overriden (no longer valid), unless otherwise stated. (So, Clayton, don't be so sure when stating "unknown according to Coromines". It may well be past water.)
With Coromines, the authority argument -if referred back to more than, say, twenty years- may automatically lose weight . . . unless, of course, explicitly
reinstated by Coromines himself in either one of his two outsized, monumental works. There, curiously, in both of them he painstakingly -sometimes even cruelly- identifies, isolates and
self-refutes in detail everything he someday said and does
not longer agree with!
(He also criss-crossed on foot every corner of the extensive Catalan geography, where he combined mountaineering with linguistic surveying. At old age he managed, given a word-variant or a place, to remember who had been his informant decades ago. He was as scientifically rigourous and combative as easy to self-retract if someone convinced him he was wrong. A truly remarkable character.)
Ton Sales (Barcelona)