Ex uno plures

[muckefuck]

One of my favourite examples of both the commonalities and divergences between the modern Romance languages:

Catalan: llevataps
Spanish: sacacorchos
Portuguese: saca-rolhas
French: tire-bouchon
Italian: cavatappi

All five terms mean the same thing: corkscrew. All five are compounds formed in the same way: finite verb + noun, lit. "it removes corks/caps/plugs". But the actual words are different in each case. Spanish and Portuguese agree on the verb (sacar "take out"), but differ when it comes to the corks. Italian and Catalan agree on what to call the corks (while disagreeing on what the plurals should be), but use different words for removing them (cavare "take out" vs. llevar "lift"). And the French are never happy unless they're doing everything their own way. Not only do they use completely different words for both "take out" and "cork", but they don't put the second in the plural like everyone else. So whereas the other words are invariable, tire-bouchon has the plural tire-bouchons. Of course, since final <s> is silent in French anyway, it ends up being a distinction without a difference. (C'est tout typique, non?)

("What about Romanian?" I hear you ask. Ever the copycat, they don't have their own word. They just borrow the French, make one or two orthographic adjustments, and say tirbuşon. Slackers.)

Update #1: And my darlings, the Friulians, just don't know which way to go. Do they want to lamely copy the French, like their kin to the northeast, and use tirebusson? Or do they want their own impenetrable little compound, ğhavestropuj? (From ğhavâ, a cognate to Italian cavare even if it doesn't look it, and the plural of stropul, whose affiliations are anyone's guess.)

Update #2: And what of those precious little Rumontsches? Could they possibly have a different term for each standard dialect in their little canton?

Sursilvan: tilastappuns
Sutsilvan: tiraclacùns
Surmiran: teiracucungs
Puter: tiracucuns
Vallader: tiracucuns

Ah, so close, little dudes, but no cigar! (What is this with Vallader piggybacking on Puter all the time?) The newish unified standard, Rumantsch Grischun, figures that two out of five is as good as it gets and goes with tiracucuns.

Update #3: Occitan, forever balancing your French heart with your Catalan limbs. Tira-tap. Verb from the former, noun from the latter (but singular, as in French).

Update #4: In Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum), Belbo introduces the other principles to the Piedmontese expression "Ma gavte la nata" or "Be so kind as to remove the cork." Does this mean that the locals would call a corkscrew at gavanate?

Comments

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that English has changed, in this respect, relatively recently; consider such V+N compounds as "pinchpenny" and "pickpocket". I think this used to be a productive form, but it's been superseded by N+V+er.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Except that compounds with -er aren't that recent a development. Peacemaker, for example, first occurs only a few decades after pinchpenny and well before makepeace or pickpocket.

Simple agent nouns in -er go back to Old English and compound occupational terms (e.g. bellmaker, bookbinder, etc.) are common by 1400. Compounds without -er (e.g. wainwright, shepherd, etc.) are even older, with attestations before 1000. (These may appear to be N-V, but they're actually N-N; before the adoption of -er from Latin, the Germanic method of deriving agent nouns was to make weak nouns from verb stems.)

By contrast, I can't find an example of one of these V-N compounds from earlier than 1362 (cutpurse); I don't remember ever seeing one in Old English. It seems to have a been always a less common means of derivation that existed side-by-side with N-V-er for a while and has now almost fallen out of use.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Huh. I did not know that.