Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

At 6:39 pm -0500 28/11/00, Carlos Thompson wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>>
>> En réponse à Eric Christopherson <raccoon@...>:
>>
>> >
>> > Spanish <pensar> "to think" (the verb to which
>> > <pienso> belongs) is a learned borrowing; the
>> > regular outcome is <pesar> "to weigh."
>>
>> In French too: penser vs. peser.
>> My Old French booklet adds that pensare was the
>> frequentative form of pendere: to hang, to weigh.
>> So from the same origin we have: penser: to think,
>> peser: to weigh, and pendre: to hang. I find it a
>> nice semantic shift :)) .
>
>Well, Spanish has "ponderar", which means to make a mental measure.
>Fr. pondérer, En. to ponder.  I wonder if they all come from Latin "to
>weight".
"ponder" etc. is from Latin 'pondera:re' "to weigh", which is derived from
the noun :pondus, (gen.) ponderis [neuter] = "weight", from which we derive
the English word "pound" (as well as 'ponderous').

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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