The word question in other languages

In Portuguese the common word for «question» is pregunta, pergunta in spanish.

The other way around.

No sé exactamente cuál es tu pregunta, pero en español es cuestión de dos palabras distinctas, con sentidos distinctos.

… Italian questione is a Latinism; chiedere is “genuine” (with r-r dissimilated to d-r). Romanian chestiune is a loan from French; the verb cere is “genuine”. I think it is similar in the other Romance languages.

The Spanish «genuine» of quaerere is querer (which has repalced also the Latin velle, see It. volere and Fr. vouloir).

It’s an interesting example for the evolution/changing of the meaning of words in time. In Italian, chiedere means «to ask» and in Spanish querer means «to want» and today also «to love».

A quibble: the «genuine» descendant of quaerere is OFr querre, not quérir ...

It’s also logical because of the stress (see Italian chi

e

dere and not chied

e

re).

… I’m not sure if there was ever a widely-used, native word in French for «question». Maybe something like demandaison.

Supposing a common Proto-Romance, one could say that some word/words had to exist for saying «question»
(Frage/pregunta/domanda) … Demandaison is a bit «complicated» and too abstract. I can hardly imagine e.g. a gladiator saying in Proto-Vulgar-Latin «Puella pulcherrima, (h)abeo una(m) demandatione(m): Amas me?» …

Or, is it really important or necessary to have a «simple» word for the noun question from the practical point of view? Maybe not at all … Our gladiator could also say (at least in theory): «Rogo/perconto/demando/quaero te: Amas me?». In such case, my hypothetical question would be: Which verb did the gladiator use?

(my Proto-Vulgar-Latin is a pure improvisation, of course ….)

Our gladiator could also say (at least in theory): «Rogo/perconto/demando/quaero te: Amas me?».

If said gladiator did indeed ask such a question he would ask

….quaero ex te(since quaero te menans I’m looking for you) : Amas-ne me? (which would leave both yes,I do and no,I don’t as viable options)

If he put it like «Nonne me amas?» he would expect the answer «yes,I do» and if he wanted to know » Num me amas?» he could be sure the answer was «No, I don’t».

Today I was thinking about «question» in romance languages, I personally only know Spanish and Portuguese. In Portuguese the common word for «question» is pregunta, pergunta in spanish. But there is also the more formal questão/cuestión, so I look up the two Latin roots: percontor and quaestio. First I’m wondering what is the difference between in usage of Latin words; second what is the nature of questão/cuestión is it a natural evolution or is it learned? Also what about the usage of cognates in other romance languages?

questao sounds quest/ and pregunta can be para gunta(for discussion)!

Percontare seems to be one of those many local archaisms developed in West Iberian (Spanish, Asturian, Portuguese).

In Catalan and Aragonese, it’s an old loanword from Renaissance Spanish, the genuine use for asking being demanar/demandar.

The presence of it in Sardinia, as in the pricunta tradition, is regarded as Spanish in origin.

The problem with this explanation is that Latin knows no intervocalic /gᵂ/, this phoneme only occurs as part of the cluster /ŋgᵂ/, so there seems to be no analogy for such a substitution. A much more convincing explanation, and one much harder to swallow for some Romanian etymological dictionaries, is that this is a cross with Slavic trebati.

Meyer-Lübke — Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, page 325
(Romanian întreba compared to Ancient French enterver and others):

Meyer-Lübke, Grammatik Der Romanischen Sprachen, page 439:

Definitely this word has suffered an unusual transformation which resulted in an intervocalic -b- (if the Latin hypothetic etymology is valid).
In the Slavic hypothetic etymology trebati has a drastic change of meaning from «to need» to «to ask (a question)» which is not entirely unexplicable, but less convincing to me.

Romanian does have words derived from Slavic trebati, but they are in correlation with the original meaning of this word:
dexonline — întrebuința «to use»
dexonline — trebui «to need (something)»
Seems to me Romanians did not perceived this Slavic root with an unusual meaning.

Nationalism in Romanian etymological dictionaries (favoring Latin etymologies against Slavic ones)?
Open question (I am not in a good position to answer).

Definitely this word has suffered an unusual transformation which resulted in an intervocalic -b- (if the Latin hypothetic etymology is valid).
In the Slavic hypothetic etymology trebati has a drastic change of meaning from «to need» to «to ask (a question)» which is not entirely unexplicable, but less convincing to me.

It’s curious that you think it a drastic change of meaning, because precisely тре́бовать means both «to need, require» and «to ask (for), demand» in Russian, and this duality of meaning seems to me to be among the most basic metaphors: English demand has it, as does Latin requīrere and I’m sure a whole mountain of other languages.

Romanian does have words derived from Slavic trebati, but they are in correlation with the original meaning of this word:
dexonline — întrebuința «to use»
dexonline — trebui «to need (something)»

These derive from the infixed denominal trebovati, but that întreb- part is just way too telling.

Note that there’s no need to talk about a change of meaning, as frequent as this change is. The verb had clearly existed from the beginning, but in another phonetic form. The prefix basically remained, but the root got reanalysed from rogare (which is preserved in Romanian) to the newly-arrived treba(re) because the latter made more sense semantically and/or was more common. So one wouldn’t talk directly of borrowing, but as I said, of a cross – especially given the clear mixing of Romance and Slavic morphemes inside the word.

That said, a change such as terg > terw > terb > treb would not be unprecedented at all, cf. Italian pargolo < parwolus in the opposite direction. Can anybody come up with parallel Romanian examples?

Hello, danielstan and Sobakus, your last posts are really interesting.

The Latin interrogare, given the prefix inter-, does not mean «simply» to ask (rather to interrogate, examine, inquire, … et similia) Finally, the corresponding verbs neither in Italian, Spanish, French, etc. do mean exactly to ask. Further more, they are considered learned words or «latinisms». (E.g. the Spanish genuine verb should be rather something like entre[r]rogar instead of interrogar).

That said, it seems to me a bit improbable that the Latin interrogare would be part of the colloquial or vulgar Latin with the meaning of «to ask» only in some specific areas …. However, everything is possible (to say so).

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I have a question: Independently on Romanian, is it «sure» that the Provençal enterva (French: question, demande) and entervar (French: interroger) derive from the Latin interrogare or there are other possible explanations, too?

The correspondence between French enterver and Provencal entervar in Meyer-Lübke made me tick a bit since usually proto Romance /VgwV/ corresponds to French /v/ but to Provencal /g/ (see aqua > OFr eve, ewe but Provencal /ajgo/, aquarium > Fr. /evje/, Pr. /e(j)gje/). This makes enterver the expected outcome of *interguare in French, but I’d have expected *entergar in provencal instead. But then I’m not sure what the outcome would be after r, if the metathesis of inter happened early.

I’m very sceptical of deriving Old French enterver from the hypothetical *interguare. The /gw/ there is post-consonantal. There’s too little examples of post-consonantal /gw/ to be sure how the sound would develop in that environment, but based on lingua > langue, I’d guess *interguare would develop into enterguer. To get enterver we would probably need an intervocalic /gw/ or maybe simply intervocalic /g/ (c.f. rogare > rover). I don’t know of any good example of intervocalic /gw/ which would show us how the cluster would develop in the relevant position: as said, it didn’t exist in Latin, and the only cases where it arose secondarily that I can think of are preterites of the type *leguit > lut. I wouldn’t use these as examples of regular sound changes as they seem to have undergone massive amounts of analogical levelling. It may we that we simply have an example of intervocalic /g/ here, along the lines of interrogāre > *enterroˈgare > *enterroˈɣare > *enterroˈvare > *enterˈvare > entervar, enterver (not necessarily according to this exacts scenario).

P.S. Some of the changes I’ve presented as sound changes here might actually be analogies to different forms of this verb. Fouché, for example, thinks /g/ was preserved after stress, i.e. rogat > ruevet, and lost before stress only to be reintroduced by analogy, i.e. rogāmus > *roons > rovons.

That said, a change such as terg > terw > terb > treb would not be unprecedented at all, cf. Italian pargolo < parwolus in the opposite direction. Can anybody come up with parallel Romanian examples?

See this search engine for Romanian words (with all possible declensions):
CuvinteCare.ro — Cuvinte care încep sau se termină cu anumite litere
I composed the search criterion «words that contain ‘treb'» :
Cuvinte care conțin treb
and the results are all in the expected areas:
derived from a Slavic treb or from this misterious Romanian întreb- .
Thus no other example of terg > terw > terb > treb change.

For me (and possibly for Meyer- Lübke) there were some arguments in favor of the evolution interrog— > întreb- :
1. The metathesis /Cer/ > /Cre/ (C denotes a consonant) which is present in many Latin inherited words in Romanian:
lat. inter > rom. între
lat. per > Old Romanian pre > rom. pe
lat. niger > rom. negru

This would explain half of the supposed evolution interrog— > întreb-.

2. The resemblance between Old French enterver, Provençal entervar and Romanian întreba
combined with the phonetic change /gw/ > /b/ which is present in some Romance languages, but in different contexts

Now that I read the contribution of @Swatters and others contesting the Provençal entervar < Latin interrogare
I am less convinced of this alchemistic mixture of arguments resulting in a serious etymology.

In fact I found some Romanian etymological dictionary contesting the Meyer- Lübke’s reasoning:
dexonline — întreba
On the last paragraph:

întrebá (întréb, întrebát), vb. – 1. A pune întrebări spre a afla un răspuns. – 2. A cerceta, a examina. – 3. A cere informații, lămuriri despre, a se interesa. – Mr. ntreb, ntribare, megl. antreb, antribare, istr. ăntreb. Lat. interrogāre (Pușcariu 891; Tiktin; DAR), cf. v. fr. anterver, prov. antervar, astur. entrugar (Menéndez Pidal, RFE, 1920, 35). Este dublet al lui interoga, vb., din lat. interrogare (sec. XIX). Rezultatul g › b, care apare și în lingua › limbă, i-a făcut pe unii cercetători să se gîndească la necesitatea unei forme lat. *interguāre (Meyer-Lübke, Rom. Gramm., I, 439; Rosetti, I, 76), presupunîndu-se că numai -gu- putea trece la b; dar această supoziție nu pare întemeiată.

It’s interesting that Romanian întreba has correspondents in Mr (Macedoromanian, better known as Aromanian), Meglenoromanian and Istroromanian, but this does not solve the dilema (Aromanian splitted from Romanian in 10th century, the others probably later).
The last part of this paragraph translates as:
«The result g > b, which appears also in lingua › limbă made some researchers think to the necessity of a form *interguare (…) supposing that only -gu- could pass to b, but this supposition doesn’t seem founded.»

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After this long and useful intellectual debate I see your point, @Sobakus and I consider it as a serious alternative, but not 100% sure:

In a normal evolution of Romanian:
Latin interrogare > *intreogare > *intregare > *întregare

At some point Romanian acquired some Slavic loanwords with the treb— root and they corrupted the hypothetic
*întregare to Romanian întrebare (verb: întreba)

Regarding inter > intre, when phrase-final, this is a pan-Romance change, with the notable exception of Sardinian (in several ways the closest relative of Rumanian), but precisely this doesn’t happen word-internally in Fr./Prov. enterv-. In Asturian, where it does happen, this precedes vowel syncope, prevents /rg/ contact, and so the /ug/ sequence is maintained: entrugar. Rumanian, together with Sardinian, are the two languages where word-medial syncope is rarest — basically it only occurs where it was already present in the 2nd c. AD (and so mostly attested), and so we would not expect it to happen in /rug/. All the more so when the simplex verb rugare was preserved intact, should have been plainly visible as being part of interrogare to the speakers, and this should have further prevented syncope. This makes a Romance etymology of —treb- even more suspect to me.

In other news I have two more relevant sound change examples: corrogāta > Fr. corvée, Rum. corvadă. There’s no /rv > rb/ in this word in Rum., and I don’t believe single intervocalic /v/ spontaneously shifts to /b/ in that language — but possible examples will be welcome.

Correction: that word’s been borrowed in this form from medieval Latin — should have properly checked the meaning!​

And another useful observation: I don’t find any Rumanian verbs in -a that derive directly from Slavic — all of them seem to be denominal. This agrees well with the fact that trebovati itself looks to be denominal in Slavic, from the noun treba «need».

*I’m now using Rumania instead of Romania because the latter already has a different historical meaning, as well as a philological one, nowadays spelt as Romània. It also designates a modern region of Italy. This confusion is annoying and especially bad when dealing with Latin, not to mention the cultural issues involved.

Are there any lists of words with this development gu>b and qu>p? I am asking because it was the regular change in most non-Latin Italic languages and, since the colonization of Dacia was — as you recently cited — predominantly from the south, these forms may have been brought by former Oscan speakers, that is they would be not properly Latin, but mixed Sabellic–Latin, in contrast with the regular evolution qu>c in când etc.

These are all very basic vocabulary items. If Oscan speakers susbstituted /kw/ for /p/, they would have done so in all the relevant words. You would have to postulate /k/ in the Rum. c-words already in Sabellic-Latin, which is no different from postulating a regular /kw > p/ sound change in Eastern Romance with preceding exceptional /kwa > ka/ (Classical already had productive /kwo > ko/). Besides, postulating Oscan immigration on the basis of observed sound changes and then explaining said sound changes on the basis of Oscan immigration is circular reasoning. This is one reason why substrate theories are have been looked down upon in Romanistics for a good part of the last century. Sorry if this sounds a bit too critical, but you’ve always seemed to be someone who doesn’t mind a bit of academic rigour.

Here’s a pretty full list (ugh, it won’t allow multiple spaces):

La. — Rum. — Sard. Logudorian (more cons.) / Campidanian (less cons.)​

aquam — apă — abba / acua​

equam — iapă — ebba / egua​

sanguen — sânge — sambene / sanguni, sanguini, sanghini etc.​

linguam — limbă — limba / lingua​

adaquāre — adăpă — Ø​

quattor — patru — battor(o) / cuatt(u)ru, batturu etc.​

cīnque — cinque — kimbe​

quandō — când — cando​

quantum — cât — cantu​

quam — ca? — ca? (both = quam x quia?)​

qu-/cōmō̆ — cum — commo, como​

​

From what I see, these are separate innovations in both languages, plus Sardinian has two separate waves of it — in fact there’s a well-known suggestion that Campidanian represents a later wave of immigration. Keep in mind, that (Ledgeway, Maiden 2016):

«More generalized palatalization of these sequences [/kw, gw/ + front vowel] is attested in Romanian, Dalmatian, southeastern varieties of Italo-Romance, Sicilian, Sardinian, Friulian, and Romansh (e.g. QUI- > Dal., Pug., Lad., Srd. [ʧi] ‘who’, Ro. [ʧe] ‘what’; Wolf 2012).»​

​

Especially in Rumanian, the reflexes of /kwI/ and /kI/ completely coincide.

Thanks. In Romanian there is also perhaps lepăda, if from *liquidāre.

In the list I discern two instances of the initial kw>p (and is pe<quid?); the rest are word-internal, as suggested by the idea cited in #40 in the update.

My Oscan idea (which is quite straightforward) seems to have been anticipated by Pisani. To elaborate, since Oscan speakers had troubles with pronouncing the Latin kw, they could substitute it both with their p or with a plain k, the latter being the source of the Romanian palatalization. Again, just a speculation as a follow-up of the idea.

About the affinities between Romanian and Southern Italian dialects (abruzzese, sicilian and pugliese):
Al-Rosetti-Istoria-Limbii-Romane-1986.pdf, pages 78-79
On page 78 (before the paragraph on dialectal similarities) there is a paragraph with an historical argumentation about these affinities:

My translation:
«Political and economical orientation of Dacia. Dacia’s political and economical orientation towards West made the new province to remain in contact with the Western provinces, receiving lexical innovations started from the center: the most important commercial route was Danube: at Viminacium (today Kostolac) there was the crossing point of the commercial route linking the West with the East and Dacia. Another commercial route (Via Apia), linked Italy by Brindisi and Durazzo, to the great commercial route (Via Egnatia) going to Salonica, approximatively on the today railway course.
The orientation towards West of the Dacian commerce, the fact that, from customs point of view, Dacia was assigned to the Illyricum circumscription, and finally, the settlement in Dacia of a great number of colonists from Dalmatia make us understand the similarities between Romanian and Central and Southern Italian dialects, similarities that cannot be explained by development in the same direction, but independently, which could be observed sometimes on the dialects deriving from a primitive common language.

Jireček (Geschichte der Serben, page 8 and following) observes that Balkan Peninsula could be traversed easier from North to South, by communication ways following the rivers valleys than by West to East.»
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I will add some personal historical arguments:

The Roman conquest in Balkans had the following main stages:
Illyria/Dalmatia (168 BC), Greece (Macedonian Kingdom, 146 BC), Moesia (6 AD), Dacia (105 AD)
which shows the main directions of Roman advance (and presumably Roman colonists flow) from Southern Italy (Brindisi) to today Albania and from there all over Balkans.

In Rome a political scheme of free grain distribution to the poors started from 123 BC (Cura Annonae) and this lead to the impoverishment of a large number of peasants from Central and Southern Italy. They became prime candidates for emigration (see also: emigrate vs. immigrate) to the new conquered territories.
It is reasonable to suppose they emigrated also to the Balkans, along with their dialects of Latin.