At 12:04:12 AM on Friday, July 25, 2008, Rick McCallister
wrote:
> I came across Spanish sendos ¨"each (of a group)". DRAE
> claims it's from Latin singulos, but it perhaps
> coincidentally looks a lot like Celtic demonstrative
> sindos. Claiming a Celtic root for sendos is a huge leap,
> but singulos > sendos also seems like a big leap. I'd
> expect something more like **siendros, sendros
Ralph Penny, Variation and Change in Spanish, p. 57,
mentions that in the 13th century both <sendos> and <seños>
are found. (Like everyone else, he derives them from Latin
<singulo:s>.) OSp. <seños> appears to match <señero>
'alone, isolated' from <singula:riu>. Moreover, Portuguese
has <senhos>, where <nh> from Latin NG'L is apparently
regular.
It's old, but I found E.H. Tuttle, 'Notes on the Spanish
Palatals', Modern Philology, Vol. 8, Nr. 4 (Apr., 1911),
p.595f, which explains <sendos> by dissimilation from
*<senzos> /sendzos/, which, he says, owed its /dz/ to the
related <senziello> < *<singellu>.
Brian