Re: describing names

----- Original Message -----
From: Christopher Wright <faceloran@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 10:58 PM
Subject: Re: describing names



> Santiago sekalge:
> >*"bonito" may be the standard Spanish for "beautiful", but in Argentina,
> we
> >hardly use it. Instead, we use "lindo".
>
> Bonito? From an archaic bon- + -ito? "Little [cute] good"? Could I then
> assume that guapo is reserved for physical appearance?
>
> Laimes,
> Wright.
Yes, "bonito" is a diminutive of "bueno", (little good)... And related to
this I find exactly the same construction in Russian: "horoshaja" (good
{femenine}), "horoshen'kaja" (little good) in which the suffix -en'k- is the
mark of the diminutive.
horoshen'kaja means cute, beautiful (better "cute")
Back to Spanish, the stem bon- turned into buen- as it was the stressed
syllable in the base word, but when adding an ending to the stem, sthe
stress moves to the next syllable, so the "o" remains the same. However,
this is a special example because the word bonito evolved separately from
bueno... The current tendency is for speakers to keep the diphthong -ue-
intact even when stress moves to another syllable, like "fuerte"
"fuertísimo", instead of "fortísimo" (both forms are accepted as far as I
know)
The word guapo is used (I conclude from hearing it on TV, radio, etc. as
again it's not a word used here in Argentina with that meaning) for physical
appearance only... Guapo in Argentina means "brave", but when pronounced by
a foreigner (either a Spanish speaker or a speaker of a foreign language) we
know that they mean beautiful