Re: OT: Another Portuguese (?) question

Well, Portuguese cutelo comes from Latin cultellus,
-i, and cotão comes from French cotton (sp?). So it looks like Plan X... :-)

If Japanese katana had entered the Portuguese language, shouldn't it be
catão instead of cotão? Anyway, such a word exists, but it comes from the
name of the Roman censor Cato the Elder.

(I'm using Gmail, please change the To: address)

JR



On 05/11/06, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
>
> Re "katana" et al.
>
> Thanks to all for your replies, helpful in a negative way ;-)
>
> Plan C: perhaps the Port/Span. borrowed (native) Jap. katana, then
> transplanted it to eastern Indonesia. However, it is odd that the word is
> not found in my Malay or Indonesian dictionaries (quite exhaustive)-- as
> almost all Port/Span. loans were spread via Malay. But it's not
> impossible--
> they hit up the Moluccas for the spices before they got around to messing
> with the rest of Indies....
>
> Plan X, accidental resemblance, is simply too far out in left field; you
> just don't get a match of 6 phonemes + semantics.
>
> As usual, "more research is needed".
>

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