WotD: empty

[muckefuck]

1. leer
2. leeg
3. vacío
4. buit
5. vide
6. gwag
7. folamh
8. pusty
9. 비다
10. 空 kōng

Notes: I swear, the more languages I study, the stupider I become. Why such a common word? Because walking home from Loyola, I realised that I couldn't think of the Spanish equivalent. Catalan, no problem; I asked myself if there was any chance it might be buido, but this simply rang false. (As it turns out, this word does exist--as a Catalanism!--but with the sense of "sharpened" or "grooved", meanings absent from buit.) Then I tried to recall the French and found myself completely stumped.

Perhaps surprisingly, these terms--and the Welsh to boot--all have their origins in Latin vacuus. The development of Welsh gwag is quite regular. Spanish vacío comes from the near-synonym vacīvus with unexpected lose of the second v. Vacīvus had a variant with o, from which we surmise that vacuus did, too, even though it isn't attested. Somewhere this acquired the second conjugation participial ending -itus; the development of *vocitus to Catalan buit is quite regular except for the initial b (which is more than merely orthographic since it exists even in those dialects which still distinguish /b/ from /v/). In Old French, *vocitus surfaces as voyde from which we get our void; Modern French vide probably derives from a variant with ui.

What about empty, though, which doesn't resemble any equivalent in either Germanic or Romance? My sources consider it a descendant of ǽmetig, a derived adjective from ǽmetta "leisure". This looks like a dead ringer for OHG emezzīg "persistent", the root of modern emsig "diligent", except that the meanings are hard to reconcile. (Leer, incidentally, is thought to be related to lesen in its sense of "glean"; a field ready for gleaning would be an "empty" one which had already been reaped.) Earlier English also had the utterly charming toom, cognate to Swedish tom, ultimate origin uncertain.

Comments

[tisoi.livejournal.com]

That's happened to me on a few occasions. I think I remember trying to talk about the summer with a Mexican girl. And the Catalan word estiu and the French été kept on interfering. I wante to say estío, which is used in Spanish but not as often as verano..

Speaking of Catalanisms... I don't know if you follow Twitter, but sometimes #catalanades will trend and you will see some funny Catalanisms that people have overheard in Catalonia.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've said estío in Castilian more than once. I think I've always caught myself before coming out with tardor though.

[pne.livejournal.com]

The first thing I thought of when I saw "pusty" was modern Greek - πούστης (vocative πούστη) is something like "faggot" (that is, slang for a gay person).