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From: deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Latin ALBVS, Semitic LBN [was Re: albino
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Date: Tue, 20 Jun 1995 21:02:17 GMT
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In article <DAB8y5.EH8@statsci.com>,
Peter Schumacher <peter@statsci.com> wrote:

>Forgive my naivete, but I find it difficult to accept that the Romans
>didn't have a perfectly good native word for "white" before they
>encountered non-Indo-European cultures, or that they should have changed
>it once they had. How can this be? I'm being serious, here.

	If their native word was so good, why did almost all the
languages derived from Latin lose it?  The only Romance languages
in which reflexes of Latin ALBVS survive as the translation of "white"
are Portuguese (where branco is nevertheless the usual word), Rumanian, 
and, I believe, some dialects of Rhaeto-Romanic and Italian.  The usual 
words for "white" in the major Romance languages are all derived from 
Germanic *blank-, e.g. Spanish blanco, French/Catalan blanc, Italian 
bianco, etc.  "Blue" and "brown" are also largely borrowed terms in
Romance (e.g. French bleu from Germanic, Spanish az/ul from Arabic, etc.)


-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
