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From: peter@statsci.com (Peter Schumacher)
Subject: Re: Latin ALBVS, Semitic LBN [was Re: albino
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Date: Sun, 25 Jun 1995 08:38:17 GMT
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deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff) writes:

>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.)

Yes, that is rather inconvenient ... Incidentally, and off topic, are
there any modern German descendants of Old Teutonic "*blanko-z"? The
English ones are obvious. And ironically, there must be a pretty old
Germanic word "wiz", whence "white", "weiss" (German), and probably "wit"
(Dutch).

Peter Schumacher
peter@statsci.com
-- 

Peter Schumacher
peter@statsci.com
