Talk:-itia

Portuguese eza

Portuguese eza is actually inherited from latin -itia and is not considered a borrowing from old spanish/occitan by any means. How do the revisions keep getting removed? Grassfuel (talk) 12:36, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Please refrain from edit warring. I haven't had a chance yet to review the source cited by Nicodene ("Malkiel, Yakov. 1983. Alternatives to the classic dichotomy family tree/wave theory? The Romance evidence. In Rauch, Irmengard & Carr, Gerald F. (eds.), Language Change, 192–256. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. §4") but I see that Nicodene has stated this is the basis of the note that you are removing. It might be arguable, but it surely bears consideration, as Malkiel was highly knowledgeable about this field. Of course, the citation and explanation should be made clearer.--Urszag (talk) 18:11, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

It can apparently be read online here here. The relevant part is as follows:

"The situation is surpassed in sheer intricacy by the development of -itia beside -itiēs in Hispano-Romance adjectival abstracts. At first glance it seems insufficient [Ed.: typo for 'sufficient'] to state that -ez (as in niñez ‘childhood’, vejez ‘old age’, borrachez in rivalry with -era ‘drunkenness’) reflects -ǐtie; that -eza (as in nobleza ‘nobility’, pobreza ‘poverty’, and riqueza ‘wealth’) perpetuates -ǐtia; that the replacement of -tāte (as in vetustāte, nobilitāte, paupertāte) is a trivial matter of suffix change; that -icia (as in malicia ‘evil, trickiness’, OSp. trist-icia ∿ -eza ‘sadness’) testifies to learnèd transmission, as does post-medieval -icie (calvicie ‘baldness’, planicie ‘plateau’). Upon closer examination, however, things turn out to be less simple and straightforward. To begin with, Old Galician-Portuguese offers two mutually competing equivalents of Sp. -ez, namely -ece and -ice (velh-ece, -ice ‘old age’), of which the second won out. Then again, the counterpart of Sp. -icia is Ptg. -iça, of distinctly less learnèd appearance, especially in lexical items like maiça ‘malice’, which visibly participated in characteristic sound changes, such as the loss of intervocalic -l-. Semantically, the words in -ice are at the opposite pole from any display of refinement and pretentiousness, referring as they do not only to age levels (e.g. meninice ‘childhood’), but also to a profusion of patterns of comic or reprehensible behavior.

Under these circumstances, should Ptg. -ez be written off as an intruder from Spanish? Should -ice and -iça be recognized as vernacular descendants of -ĭtie and -ĭtia, respectively—merely protected from the “overlay” by a Latinizing tendency (whereas -ícia and ície, traceable to modern times, could then pass off as genuine “cultismos,” suggested by Latin models and precedents in neighboring Castile)? Were -ece and -ice once regionally separated? And is -eza essentially a Provençalism, with Old Spanish pressure acting as a reinforcement? [Footnote 46: phonologically, the relation of -ez to -ece reminds one strongly of Sp. -d as the counterpart of Ptg. -de, as in ciudad (originally cibdad) vs. cidade ‘city’ < cīvitāte lit. ‘citizenship’ (to the exclusion of cases like Sp. merced vs. Ptg. mercê ‘mercy, grace’ < mercēde, which involve ancestral -d-, rather then -t-, in radical-final position). Morphologically and lexically, Sp. -icia vs. Ptg. -iça calls to mind other instances of derivational suffixes transmitted through a learned conduit in the Center, but not in the West; witness (O)Ptg. -ença beside Sp. -encia < -entia, except for scattered relics of older usage, such as OSp. simiença ‘seed’ < sementia.]"

As for the source that @Grassfuel cited, it says nothing more than:

'Origem etimológica: sufixo latino -itia, -ae.'

This doesn't help us, as the etymological origin is not the issue at hand. What we are discussing is how precisely the Latin -itia arrived into Portuguese as -eza. In my view, the voiced z (for the phonetically expected /s/) is clear evidence of borrowing via another Romance language. As Malkiel mentions, the Occitan and Spanish -eza makes for a plausible candidate. Nicodene (talk) 18:44, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

The cited source seems to be available via open access, but I cannot find any point where it discusses a Portuguese ending -eza. Nicodene, can you elaborate? Among other things, Malkiel says the following: "Old Galician-Portuguese offers two mutually competing equivalents of Sp. -ez, namely -ece and -ice (velh-ece, -ice ‘old age’), of which the second won out. Then again, the counterpart of Sp. -icia is Ptg. -iça, of distinctly less learnèd appearance, especially in lexical items like maiça ‘malice’, which visibly participated in characteristic sound changes, such as the loss of intervocalic -l-." The voiceless sibilant in -iça seems to be regular per Malkiel, which implies that the voiced sibilant in -eza wouldn't be (the inherited form should have instead been (*?)-eça). Borrowing therefore seems plausible to me on the basis of the -z-, but I don't see direct support for this assertion in Malkiel 1983.--Urszag (talk) 18:41, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

It seems we were writing our comments at the same time.

The second paragraph quoted above makes his stance clearer. He does not present the foreign origin of Portuguese -eza as an absolute certainty, mind, so much as something that he strongly suspects. So we could add a qualifier such as 'Malkiel suggests it may be...'

The expected consonant outcome is indeed ⟨ç⟩ in Portuguese (medieval /t͡s/) and ⟨z⟩ in Spanish (medieval /d͡z/). Cf. the outcomes of Latin -icius. Nicodene (talk) 18:55, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

The point seems to have been addressed more directly by Malkiel in 1988: "A Cluster of (Old) Portuguese Derivational Suffixes: -ece, -ice, -ez(a), Viewed in Relation to their Spanish Counterparts" (Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 65:1, 1-19). I am reading that now.--Urszag (talk) 19:02, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Frustratingly, Malkiel doesn't discuss -eza too extensively here either. The bulk of the paper is on -ez, and he argues its use in Portuguese is definitely attributable to Spanish influence, but from what I can see Malkiel views -eza as a native or largely native Portuguese suffix. He says that it is currently more productive in Portuguese than in Spanish. "In Old Galician-Portuguese the suffix [-itie] was weakly articulated on the functional side and appeared in three variants, of which -ece, the one most normally developed, perished before long; -ice in the end acquired a humorous or vituperative meaning; and -ez is best explained as due to slow infiltration of a sprinkling of Castilian model words. This influx has gained momentum after 1550, without preventing local -eza from remaining uninterruptedly active (unlike the state of affairs in Spanish)" (page 12). Then at the end of the paper, "(b) The two problems isolated for future inspection are: (a) the exact relation of -ece to -ice, and (b) the status of Sp. Ptg. -eza, viewed in the historical perspective. [...] As for the voicing of the ç in -eza, it can be attributed to pressure of Old Provençal, especially in reference to chivalric qualities (nobreza) and to their opposites (vileza); or to a phonosymbolic process; or else to some combination of the two forces⁴⁰" Footnote 40: "The suffix -eza, shared by Spanish and Portuguese, poses a difficulty not yet solved […] Two rival avenues of approach come to mind: either (a) an appeal to Old Provençal influence spreading from abstracts which bore on chivalric culture (nobleza, riqueza) and before long engulfing the realm of their opposites (pereza, pobreza, vileza); or (b) the assumption of a phonosymbolic process within Hispano-Romance, with a set of 'noble' suffixes initially set off from the remainder of root and grammatical morphemes, on the inescapable assumption of eventual blurring of the border-line between the two domains. This second hypothesis is the one I espoused in an earlier paper: 'Derivational Transparency as an Occasional Co-Determinant of Sound Change: A New Causal Ingredient in the Distribution of -ç- and -z- in Ancient Hispano-Romance', RPh, XXV:1 (1971),1-52, esp. 43-52."--Urszag (talk) 19:21, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

As for -iça, while it does seem to be one outcome of -itia, I'm not sure it's worth mentioning given that it is both irregular and I suspect unproductive: Malkiel's example "maiça" seems to be obscure.--Urszag (talk) 19:26, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

In light of this new information, I propose a description along the following lines for the Galician-Portuguese -eza:

From Old Galician-Portuguese -eza, apparently modified from a pre-literary *-eça, likely on the model of the Old Occitan cognate -eza (or else via some phonosymbolic process). Cf. the non-productive -iça found in cobiiça, lidiça, maiça, preguiça, justiça < Latin cupiditia, laetitia, malitia, pigritia, justitia, where the vowel /i/ (for expected */e/) may be explained as the effect of learned influence or else analogy with -iço, -a < Latin -īcius, -a. Cf. also the Portuguese -ice < medieval -ice/-ece < Latin -itiem.

Nicodene (talk) 20:01, 12 June 2023 (UTC)