From: clayton_rc
Message: 46627
Date: 2006-11-30
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tonsls" <ton.sales@...> wrote:
>
> --- 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)
>