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Hi guys,

1. Does anyone have a link to a free, good etymological dictionary of Spanish? I'm thinking something like etymonline.com.

2. Is the Spanish article el from or was it reinforced by Arabic al?

On 2) It's from the Latin demonstrative pronoun ille / illa / illud, like the articles of most Romance languages. Whether there is any evidence on it being enforced by the Arabic article, I don't know.

Wikipedia says it's coincidental without giving any citations, and think it is very likely to be the case. Italian for el is il, which is similar enough to suggest that it was an internally drive change, rather than influenced by Arabic.

When languages are similar and the social situation puts a lot of people in a similar environment for a long time there can be cross over (Old Norse had a fairly unusual impact on English, as a pronoun and a copula verb form were borrowed into the language) but generally function words aren't borrowed.

hwhatting wrote:On 2) It's from the Latin demonstrative pronoun ille / illa / illud, like the articles of most Romance languages. Whether there is any evidence on it being enforced by the Arabic article, I don't know.

This seems highly unlikely given the number of Spanish words borrowed from Arabic which incorporate the article. It's also worth pointing out that the Arabic article undergoes a well-established set of assimilations before coronal consonants which have no parallel in Spanish (or most of Western Romance), e.g. al-dīwān > ad-dīwān > aduana "customs house".

The funny thing to me is that il is a common allomorph of al in Maghrebi Arabic (cf. Maltese), yet I never see people indulge in the same sort of speculation regarding Italian il.

1. There exists an excellent etymological dictionary for Spanish, namely Joan Coromines's (in something like 12 volumes), but to my knowledge nobody has put it online, not even illegally.

Whenever I want to check where a word comes from I just check what appears in the DRAE (not entirely reliable, many entries have no etymology). The website etimologias.dechile.net sometimes has nice articles, but there's a lot of words missing.

I just checked - the abridged version (Breve Diccionario) is available on scribd. IIRC, with scribd you can check a certain numer of books for free each month, and above that you'll have to pay a subscription fee.

Serafín wrote:Whenever I want to check where a word comes from I just check what appears in the DRAE (not entirely reliable, many entries have no etymology). The website etimologias.decile. net sometimes has nice articles, but there's a lot of words missing.

The DRAE blows so hard when it comes to etymology, it's mystifying. Even the ones they give tend to be minimalist (i.e. an etymon with no information on development or transition) and sometimes misleading or even wrong. Honestly, I find Wiktionary a more reliable and useful source by comparison. (I'm especially struck by the contrast with Catalan, which has two solid online resources: the online GREC dictionary and Alcover & Moll's venerable DCVB. These are handy for Spanish words with close Catalan cognates.)

Serafín wrote:1. There exists an excellent etymological dictionary for Spanish, namely Joan Coromines's (in something like 12 volumes), but to my knowledge nobody has put it online, not even illegally.

I'm happy to announce that I was wrong. Very wrong. The whole thing has been available on Scribd for years, and I was only informed about this yesterday.

Linkety links:
A-CA
https://www.scribd.com/document/1572030 ... s-Joan-pdf
C-F
https://www.scribd.com/doc/157209215/Di ... s-Joan-pdf
G-MA
https://www.scribd.com/document/1584362 ... s-Joan-pdf
ME-RE
https://www.scribd.com/doc/84536790/Dic ... gico-ME-RE
RI-X
https://www.scribd.com/doc/84544788/Dic ... ogico-RI-X
Y-Z
https://www.scribd.com/doc/258489851/Di ... logico-Y-Z
Yeah, it's just 6 volumes, not 12.

The one-volume Breve edition
https://www.scribd.com/doc/162797514/Jo ... castellana

Note that to view or download the documents you need either to have a paid account, or to contribute to the website by uploading documents.

Serafín wrote:

Serafín wrote:1. There exists an excellent etymological dictionary for Spanish, namely Joan Coromines's (in something like 12 volumes), but to my knowledge nobody has put it online, not even illegally.

I'm happy to announce that I was wrong. Very wrong. The whole thing has been available on Scribd for years, and I was only informed about this yesterday.

Thanks for this. I may need to subscribe!