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albicocca (W3)

Two English apr-words, part 2: "Apricot"

AUGUST 8TH 2012

By Anatoly Liberman

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The Romans first called the fruit "malum (or prunum) Armeniacum" = "Armenian apple (or plum)" and after that "malum praecoquum" = "early ripening apple" (compare Engl. "precocious") because apricots were considered to be a kind of peaches, but they ripen first. Latin "coquere" means "cook” (the English verb is a borrowing of it). Consequently, "praecoquere" means "cook", "boil beforehand". Our "precocious children" are (figuratively speaking) ready for use "(cooked) too soon". The Greeks pronounced the Latin adjective as "praikókon", but in Byzantium it changed to "beríkokkon". In this form it became known to the Arabs, who shortened it and added the definite article. The result was "al-burquq" and "al-barquq". The Modern Romance names of the "apricot" owe their existence to Arabic: Spanish "albaricoque", Portuguese "albricoque", Italian "albercocca", "albicocca" (in dialects often without the Arabic article), and French "apricot". It may seem more natural to suppose that the point of departure was the East rather than Rome, but things probably happened as described above.
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"Apricot"

This term, which comes from the French "abricot" - and was "aubercot" until the Fifteenth Century - does not have one simple etymology, but rather a combination of several, involving a considerable juxtaposition of ideas. On the one hand, we have Portuguese "albricoque", Spanish "albaricoque" and Italian "albicocca", which all stem from the Arabic "al barqouq" or "al birquq", for the Iberian Peninsula owed much to the Arab gardeners of Southern Spain (Andalusia). The Arabic word means "early-ripe", and itself derives from the Latin "praecox" or "praecoquum malum" (in Greek, "praecoxon"), meaning "early-ripener" and "early-ripening apple", respectively (see the etymology of "apple"). This was the name given by the Roman legionaries when they first brought the fruit back to Rome, as they were returning from the Near East in the first century. Being easy to eat, it also was called "aperitum", "fruit which opens easily", and there is an association with Greek "abros", "delicate", for it does not travel well and ripens very quickly. The idea that there was a connection with Latin "apricus", "ripe", may have given rise to the "p" in English "apricot", which combines with the French "-cot" ending. Incidentally, the fruit is "Aprikose" to the Germans and "abrikos" to the Russians, but all these roads lead to Rome, from where the term - and the fruit - first spread throughout Europe.

Metanalysis (W3)

"Rebracketing" [frz. "Mécoupure", "coupure fautive", "métanalyse"] (also known as "resegmentation" or "metanalysis") is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one source is broken down or bracketed into a different set of factors. It is a form of "folk etymology", where the new factors may appear meaningful (e.g. "hamburger" taken to mean a "burger with ham"), or may seem to be the result of valid morphological processes.

"Rebracketing" often focuses on highly probable word boundaries: "a noodle" might become "an oodle", since "an oodle" sounds just as grammatically correct as "a noodle", and likewise "an eagle" might become "a neagle", but "the bowl" would not become "th ebowl" and "a kite" would not become "ak ite".

Technically, "bracketing" is the process of breaking an utterance into its constituent parts. The term is akin to parsing for larger sentences, but it is normally restricted to morphological processes at the sublexical level, i.e. within the particular word or lexeme. For example, the word "uneventful" is conventionally bracketed as [un+[event+ful]], and the bracketing [[un+event]+ful] leads to completely different semantics. "Re-bracketing" is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new etymology becomes the conventional norm. The name "false splitting", also called "misdivision", in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle" examples above).

The name "juncture loss" may be specially deployed to refer to the case of an article and a noun fusing (such as if "the jar" were to become "(the) thejar" or "an apple" were to become "(an) anapple"). Loss of juncture is especially common in the cases of loanwords and loan phrases in which the recipient language's speakers at the time of the word's introduction did not realize an article to be already present (e.g. numerous Arabic-derived words beginning "al-" ("the"), including "algorithm", "alcohol", "alchemy", etc.). Especially in the case of loan phrases, "juncture loss" may be recognized as substandard even when widespread (e.g. "the hoi polloi", where Greek "hoi" = "the", and "the Magna Carta", in which no article is necessary because "magna carta" is borrowed rather than calqued, Latin's lack of articles makes the original term either implicitly definite or indeterminate with respect to definiteness [in this context, the former], and the English phrase's proper-noun status renders unnecessary any further determination through the use of an article).

As a statistical change within a language within any century, "rebracketing" is a very weak statistical phenomenon. Even during phonetic template shifts, it is at best only probable that 0.1% of the vocabulary may be rebracketed in any given century.

"Rebracketing" is part of the process of language change, and often operates together with sound changes that facilitate the new etymology.

"Rebracketing" is sometimes used for jocular purposes, for example "psychotherapist" can be rebracketed jocularly as "Psycho the rapist", and "together in trouble" can be rebracketed jocularly as "to get her in trouble".
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