--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <bm.brian@...> wrote:
>
> At 7:19:45 PM on Sunday, April 24, 2011, Rick McCallister wrote:
>
> > The root seems to fit with English truck "dealings with",
> > originally "to barter, exchange" < Anglo-Norman truquer
> > --no known etymology
>
> ONFr <troquer> 'to barter, exchange', Med. Lat. <trocare>
> 'to barter'. <http://atilf.atilf.fr/> says of <troquer>:
>
> Peut-être d'un rad. onomat. trokk- (FEW t. 13, 2, p. 317)
> exprimant le frappement des mains des contractants, dans
> un geste destiné à valider l'échange (cf. toper). Cf. m.
> angl. trukie « donner en échange d'autre chose » (av. 1225
> Ancren riwle 408 ds NED, s.v. truck) et lat. médiév.
> trocare (1257 Cartulaire de l'abbaye de Saint-Florent,
> près de Saumur ds DU CANGE, s.v. trocare: equos [...]
> vendere vel trocare).
>
> > and Spanish trocar "to barter, trade, exchange" --no known
> > etymology__
Who came up with that ATILF etymology, the Monty Python crew? The sound of medieval barterers high-fiving was "trokk, trokk"? That is about as convincing as Jespersen's derivation of Latin <plumbum> from "plump goes the lead".
The OED regards <troquer> as the Norman or Picard equivalent of (Old) French *trocher, but the absence of the latter from present-day French should raise a red flag. If instead <trocar> spread from Spanish well after the central French palatalization of inherited /k/ before /a/ was complete, it would explain why only forms with /k/ are found in French. Although cited as a cognate by the OED, Italian <truccare> 'to apply make-up to, fix (a contest), warm up (an engine)' is neither phonetically nor semantically concordant with <troquer>.
Obsolete Spanish <trocir> 'to pass (space or time); to die' comes from Latin <tra:du:cere>, and Sp. <trocha> 'cross-path; short-cut' continues Lat. <tra:ducta>. Hence Sp. <trocar> could represent a local Vulgar Latin *traduccare, formed from the inherited prefix *tra- and a noun *ducca 'bundle' borrowed from Gothic *dukkan- 'id.', cognate with the second element of Old English <fingerdocca> 'finger-muscle'. When the Goths poured into Spain, they were hardly likely to be using the Roman currency system for most transactions. Other than looting, their economic activity probably consisted mainly of bartering. The new VL coinage *traduccare 'to exchange bundles' would describe this, and would continue in use to denote bartering after the Goths had settled down. The OED (as well as ATILF) notes that Medieval Latin <trocare> is first attested in 1257, and it is likely that the verb did not spread from Spain to Portugal and France (and thence to England) until the 12th or 13th century, when increased commerce demanded a larger vocabulary. The nouns meaning 'exchange, barter, swap', Pg. <troca> and Fr. <troc> (formerly spelled <troq>), can be regarded as independent back-formations from the verb.
One difficulty is that besides 'to exchange (merchandise), barter, commute, swap, truck', Sp. <trocar> also means 'to vomit'.
Among U.S. English colloquial phrases for the verb 'vomit', Berrey and Van den Bark cite "cast up one's accounts", and for the noun 'vomit', "happy returns (of the day)". Phrases such as "turn one's guts" and "turn one's stomach" also suggest a sort of exchange, so perhaps the emetic sense of Sp. <trocar> has a similar explanation.
Also, Fr. <troquer> has the additional non-economic meaning 'to chop'. This looks like a folk-etymological alteration of <tronquer> 'to truncate, mutilate, mangle, garble', but I find the basis for such an alteration rather opaque.
DGK