There is a small subset of French surnames beginning with the letters Capde- (e.g. Capdeville, Capdebosq).
It’s easy to pick out the “deville” of Capdeville as meaning “of the town” (cf. English -ton). I can assume that the “de” in Capdebosq also means “of (something)”. But from where does the initial “Cap-” derive?
Head of - as a peninsular, so a geographic rather than political meaning. A sort of Top of the Town, Top of the Woods type thing.
Ah … so the surname may well be older than the French consonantal shift that turned many initial c’s to ch (e.g. chat, château, chapeau, etc.).
Google did turn up that bosq/bosq is a Southern French (Occitan? Provençal?) version of the Standard French bois (woods). Didn’t know that this morning.
One question leads to another – do most French words that end in -q come from a Southern French dialect?
Can’t answer that I’m afraid but it would seem logical, bosco is Italian and the Savoy kingdom took in parts of what are now France and Italy. However the first French ‘cap’ example which sprung into my head was ‘Cap Gris Nez’ which is (IIRC) in the North on the English Channel/La Manche.
“Cap” is still a French word. I’m not certain about why the palatalization of “ca” in French wasn’t completely thorough, except that when you look at other Romance languages, the palatalization of “ce” and “ci” is a much stronger Romance trait, while palatalization of “ca” is comparatively rarer. Alternatively, “cap” might be a fairly recent borrowing from some other Romance language.
What fooled me was the final “p”. Isn’t that pretty rare in standard French spelling (as opposed to pronunciation)?
On second thought, I believe loup (wolf) is good French, actually.
Well, gee, there’s also coup, too. I guess it’s not super rare … maybe prportionally infrequent.
My French ain’t great, but I’ve never noticed that words ending in “p” are at all uncommon. It’s the ones that end in “q” that freak me out. “Cinq”? “Coq”? What the fuck are you trying to pull with that shit?
That’s a good one … why avec and not aveq?
Well … you know how words that start with Q and X in English are in smaller proportion that words that start with S and D? Like that. Not rare like “words ending in -gry”.