Jan. 6th, 2004 12:43 pm
Geek thrills: L'histoire de 'chaumette'
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monshu stopped by on Sunday, he was kind enough to bring me some things I'd left at his place. We'd had a little show-and-tell the day I got back from STL. He'd displayed the contents of the big box o' gifts he traditionally gets from his family and I'd whipped out what I had of the swag brought back from my family. One of these items was actually a much-belated birthday gift, a bottle of wine my sister and her husband picked up at a tiny winery near Ste. Genevieve.
What's it taste like? Who knows! As usual, I was captivated by the wrapping--in this case, the label, which is decorated with a spattering of tiny cottages. The producer's name is Chaumette, a name neither of us had heard before. Last week, atmonshu's, I'd looked it up in the Larousse and found an entry for chaume meaning "thatch" or "thatched roof" (from Latin calamus, itself a borrowing of Greek kalamos "reed". The derivation is really quite regular if you keep in mind the stress in Latin: cálamu(m) syncopates to *cálmu, the initial consonant palatalises to ch and the final vowel becomes a shwa, i.e. *chalme, then the l vocalises to u and--voila--chaume). The meaning concords well with that given on the inevitable website which defines it as "little roofs" (even though it's singular in form, but whatever).
Only one thing bothered me about this tidy explanation: Despite the ending, chaume is masculine. From what I know of French morphology, the expected diminutive form would be, too, i.e. *chaumet. On Sunday, I pulled down the Harrap's and went on a fishing expedition for other French words that were masculine but had feminine diminutives. No luck; I needed bigger guns. Today, I spent some quality time today with Coromines, whose exhaustive multivolume etymological dictionaries of Catalan and Castilian are my idea of pleasure reading. I had a backlog of words I wanted to look up in them, high on the list the curious term páramo--variously definied as "moor" or "dry plateau"--that popped up inmonshu's Latin dictionary under the form paramus while I was looking for something else. Scholar agree that it doesn't appear to be Latin, or Greek, or Basque, or Celtic, or any other language we know at all well, leaving the field wide open for speculation.
One of the few solid facts about the word is that it's only found in western Iberia; there's no evidence for it in Catalan, Aragonese, or Murcian. In these places, the correponding term is calm, -e, -a from a proposed Celtic *calmis "barren field, desolate place". Something clicked: The regular development of this in French would also be chaume, but with one crucial difference: It would be feminine, not masculine. Sure enough, the Dictionnaire de l'ancien français lists exactly this form. La Chaumette isn't named for a thatched roof, it's named for a crappy piece of land. Let's hope that doesn't describe its American namesake and that Hank Johnson is a better winemaker than onomastician.
monshu stopped by on Sunday, he was kind enough to bring me some things I'd left at his place. We'd had a little show-and-tell the day I got back from STL. He'd displayed the contents of the big box o' gifts he traditionally gets from his family and I'd whipped out what I had of the swag brought back from my family. One of these items was actually a much-belated birthday gift, a bottle of wine my sister and her husband picked up at a tiny winery near Ste. Genevieve.What's it taste like? Who knows! As usual, I was captivated by the wrapping--in this case, the label, which is decorated with a spattering of tiny cottages. The producer's name is Chaumette, a name neither of us had heard before. Last week, at
monshu's, I'd looked it up in the Larousse and found an entry for chaume meaning "thatch" or "thatched roof" (from Latin calamus, itself a borrowing of Greek kalamos "reed". The derivation is really quite regular if you keep in mind the stress in Latin: cálamu(m) syncopates to *cálmu, the initial consonant palatalises to ch and the final vowel becomes a shwa, i.e. *chalme, then the l vocalises to u and--voila--chaume). The meaning concords well with that given on the inevitable website which defines it as "little roofs" (even though it's singular in form, but whatever).Only one thing bothered me about this tidy explanation: Despite the ending, chaume is masculine. From what I know of French morphology, the expected diminutive form would be, too, i.e. *chaumet. On Sunday, I pulled down the Harrap's and went on a fishing expedition for other French words that were masculine but had feminine diminutives. No luck; I needed bigger guns. Today, I spent some quality time today with Coromines, whose exhaustive multivolume etymological dictionaries of Catalan and Castilian are my idea of pleasure reading. I had a backlog of words I wanted to look up in them, high on the list the curious term páramo--variously definied as "moor" or "dry plateau"--that popped up in
monshu's Latin dictionary under the form paramus while I was looking for something else. Scholar agree that it doesn't appear to be Latin, or Greek, or Basque, or Celtic, or any other language we know at all well, leaving the field wide open for speculation.One of the few solid facts about the word is that it's only found in western Iberia; there's no evidence for it in Catalan, Aragonese, or Murcian. In these places, the correponding term is calm, -e, -a from a proposed Celtic *calmis "barren field, desolate place". Something clicked: The regular development of this in French would also be chaume, but with one crucial difference: It would be feminine, not masculine. Sure enough, the Dictionnaire de l'ancien français lists exactly this form. La Chaumette isn't named for a thatched roof, it's named for a crappy piece of land. Let's hope that doesn't describe its American namesake and that Hank Johnson is a better winemaker than onomastician.