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Oct. 26th, 2011 04:43 pm
Assidulously sedulous
My favourite word of the moment is "sedulous". I stumbled across it in a test purporting to estimate the size of your English vocabulary where it was one of the (mercifully) few words which I never remember having come across before in my life. If I'd had to guess, I would've connected it with sedile and other derivatives of Latin sedeo "to sit", but its origins are much more interesting than that: Latin sedulus appears to be a back-formation from the adverb sedolo "sincerely; diligently", which in turn derives from a phrase: se "without" dolo (abl. of dolus) "guile".
Sadly, it doesn't seem to have left any descendents in Romance unless you count the learned Italian borrowing sedulo. That's a pity, because it would've been interesting to see the forms. My best guess is that it would've ended up as something like *seul in French and Occitan, *seu in Portuguese, and *seul (with open [ɛ]) in Catalan. But I'm baffled when it comes to Spanish. Intervocalic /d/ seems to have been irregularly retained in some inherited words (e.g. crudo), but how would the medial cluster *sedlo have been resolved? And if the /d/ had been lost, how would Spanish have dealt with the resulting hiatus? The usually reliable Penny is not much help here.
The marriage of sound and meaning would also make it a top-notch given name. Can't you hear in your mind's ear a posh 19th-century English girl telling her suitor, "Really, Sedulus, you're being awfully silly!"? Or imagine our fearless investigators finding the hidden passage beneath the altarstone of the little chapel of San Sedolo in the heart of the Dolomites? Or the wily servant Sedulus besting his dopey old master and sneaking out to enjoy Saturnalia?
Speaking of posh English girls, there was a young woman on the shuttle today with an exquisitely upper-class delivery. There was so much creaky voice in her intonation that she sounded like she was on the point of expiring any moment. It would have been irritating too listen to if it weren't so ravishingly over the top.
Sadly, it doesn't seem to have left any descendents in Romance unless you count the learned Italian borrowing sedulo. That's a pity, because it would've been interesting to see the forms. My best guess is that it would've ended up as something like *seul in French and Occitan, *seu in Portuguese, and *seul (with open [ɛ]) in Catalan. But I'm baffled when it comes to Spanish. Intervocalic /d/ seems to have been irregularly retained in some inherited words (e.g. crudo), but how would the medial cluster *sedlo have been resolved? And if the /d/ had been lost, how would Spanish have dealt with the resulting hiatus? The usually reliable Penny is not much help here.
The marriage of sound and meaning would also make it a top-notch given name. Can't you hear in your mind's ear a posh 19th-century English girl telling her suitor, "Really, Sedulus, you're being awfully silly!"? Or imagine our fearless investigators finding the hidden passage beneath the altarstone of the little chapel of San Sedolo in the heart of the Dolomites? Or the wily servant Sedulus besting his dopey old master and sneaking out to enjoy Saturnalia?
Speaking of posh English girls, there was a young woman on the shuttle today with an exquisitely upper-class delivery. There was so much creaky voice in her intonation that she sounded like she was on the point of expiring any moment. It would have been irritating too listen to if it weren't so ravishingly over the top.
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