I was just thinking about some Spanish verbs, in particular the verbs viajar, amenazar, encontrar, and comenzar.
These words mean to travel, to threaten, to find and to begin.
But their cognates (is that the right term?) in English are to voyage, to menace, to encounter, and to commence.
Why is it that English speakers don’t use these terms as often as the more common ones? They are not used rarely, but more in specialized situations. We’ll say “bon voyage” and “maiden voyage” but won’t say “Where are you voyaging to for vacation?” Similarly, we’ll say “It was a chance encounter” but won’t say “I encountered the phone in the living room”. Further, “He was a menace to society” but not “Stop menacing me!” I have no experience with French or Italian, but I notice they too, at least for viajar, have their own cognates (viaggare and voyager).
Why did these and other verbs (e.g preocuparse/preoccupy meaning worry, etc.) kind of shuffle off their roots in English, where their cognate is now a specialized term?
Did someone decide that travel was a better word than voyage or something?
And why these verbs, where other verbs like usar and aceptar basically didn’t change meanings at all (use and accept)?
I suspect that the answer in most cases is that people just use the perfectly good words for these ideas that came from Old English’s Germanic roots. Words like ‘begin’, and ‘meet’.
After the Norman conquest, English added a bunch of Latin-based words (such as ‘commence’, and ‘encounter’), but a lot of the time the old Germanic words stuck around as the everyday words, while the Latin ones were added as the fancy 50-cent versions.
“Voyage” is very common as a noun, and there is not another word that conveys exactly the same meaning; I think that the word gets such a workout as a noun, it sounds odd when used as a verb, almost incorrect.
I think people do use the word “encounter,” pretty often, just maybe not exactly the way it would be used in Spanish. There’s nothing unusual about that. Some dialects of English don’t use a word the same way as other dialects, so why would one expect an entirely different language to use the word the same way?
“Menace” is also a pretty common noun. It’s also a pretty strong word. It’s actually a word that is in the criminal code in a lot of places, so it really isn’t a word to be tossed around lightly-- it’s a much stronger word than, say, “bother,” or even “annoy.” It has sinister and even criminal connotations. Perhaps people don’t “menace” all that often, and thank goodness.
“Commence” isn’t used as often as “begin,” but I hear it. Most English speakers do tend to favor the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic words, over Latinate words when they mean essentially the same thing, but it isn’t as though “commence” is extinct. And “commencement” has connotations that makes it a very different word from “beginning” as a noun. “Commencement,” you hear a lot, especially in May and June.
Actually, I wonder if some people aren’t possibly confused about the meaning of “commencement,” now that I think about it. People may not realize it means “beginning,” as in, the beginning of your adult life now that you are a graduate, and they think it means “conclusion.” That could confuse people regarding what “commence” actually means, so it might be used less often than it would otherwise. But I just now thought of it-- totally untested theory.
Yeah. A related thread, about names of food; specifically, about animals whose name derives from Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) roots but once they’re plated they learn Latin (French).
Of course there is embarrass and embarazar, where a verb with the same root (to block or to bar) has taken on a very distinct meaning in English and Spanish.
There are a great many words in English and Spanish that are recognizably similar (enough to be called cognates, I think) which have very roughly similar – but not exactly similar – meanings. Or at least where you can see some common underlying idea in their meanings.
The example of embarazada (meaning pregnant) sounds like an anachronism today. I think it goes back to the bad old days when a visibly pregnant female would be embarrassed to be seen in public that way. I surprised that the word is still tolerated, with modern-day feminism and the emancipation of women. I would have thought that Spanish-speaking women would have risen up and demanded a different word be used these days.
I saw another example today: A chain link fence around a playground with a sign saying “Climbing over fence forbidden”, and also in Spanish. I didn’t make note of the Spanish, except to notice the word for “climb over” was “escalar”. This is a recognizable cognate with the English “scale” (meaning to climb something) and similar words like “escalate”.
Ha! Compare English “rusty” with Spanish “oxidado.” Or “slow down!” with “¡disminuya su velocidad!”. English, to an English speaker, just sounds so much earthier and real.
Yes, but within English you can still use words that come from the Germanic or words that come from the Romanic. I.e., “suck balls” (G) vs “imbibe ovoids” ®. Although there are probably some examples where the Romanic version makes more sense.
Of course as a native Dutch speaker I’m even more partial ® to the Germanic root words. Or rather, I like (G) them more.
You are thinking in English. In Spanish, an embarazo is either a pregnancy or a physical obstacle, but not an embarrasment. There are situaciones embarazosas (embarrasing situations), as the expression with the closest meaning to the English word.
The linkage between pregnancy and physical obstacle is evident to anybody who’s been around a woman in her third trimester.