Re: Greekisms in Spanish

Brian Betty <bbetty@...> wrote:
> On 2/16/99, John Cowan wrote:
> "In addition, Spanish has borrowed from Latin (learned words), Greek
(both
> in VL times and modern times, an example of the former is "cada" = "each"
<
> "kata")"
>
> One of the most interesting terms borrowed from Greek is tio/tia. I
haven't
> the info in front of me, but I read that both these terms and possibly
> others were borrowed from Greek - something about the Greek trade in
Roman
> times. Anyone have more info on this surprising turn of events?
I don't know when this was borrowed -- but another one is _cara_ = "face"
(Greek _kara_). A theory I read says that this was probably adopted to
avoid conflict with other words.

The problem was:

_facies_ "face"
_fascis_ "a lot of plant stems tied together" (what's the English word?)

When the last sounds were simplified we got "faz" for both words,
and if things had been let to follow this course, they would have
become "haz" and then "az", this last word in turn becoming identical
to "az" < "acies" ("vanguard, front line"). So "acies" disappeared;
"haz" was only used for _fascis_, and "faz" was frozen, its place
taken by the Greek loan "cara". Today, "faz" means "face" but only
in poetic writing and a fixed phrase "la faz de la tierra" = "the
face of the earth"; and "haz" /as/ means "beam/set of beams" (as in
"haz de luz" = "beam of light").


--Pablo Flores

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