Talk:puta

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Etymology

For the Romance word (deprecated template usage) puta (in French puta, Italian puttana) there seems to be two rival etymologies. Is there one that is more credible than the other? Some say that it derived from Latin puella (“girl”), some say that it comes from Latin pūtidus (“rotten, decaying, stinking, putrid”). Mglovesfun (talk) 15:52, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

From Vulgar Latin puta (“prostitute”), probably from Latin puteo (“stink”). Theories that relate it to Italian putto (“child”), from Latin boy, are without merit because they confuse it with the Classical Latin puta (“pruning”), which has a very different etymology. —Stephen (Talk) 16:51, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
These theories relate it to Italian putto because there is a Vulgar Latin word putta(m) (“girl”) which is also attested in the meaning of "prostitute" (sixth century, Grégoire de Tours).
The change of meaning from "girl" to "prostitute" isn't strange. Similar things occure more often, like German Dirne (“prostitute”) (originally "girl"). Or German Frau (“woman”) (originally "lady, noble woman"). Or German Bube (“boy”) whereas cognate Dutch boef means something like "criminal".
We should mention all theories if they are presented by serious linguists, even if these theories contradict to each other.
--MaEr (talk) 12:18, 12 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

sanskrit etymology[edit]

Is a more convincing etymology not from Sanskrit - the word "Pūtanā", broken as "Pūt" (virtue) and "nā" (no) means "devoid of virtue" ? See this entry on the female demon Putana

No, English borrowed it directly from Spanish. —Stephen (Talk) 17:57, 27 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

mut'ah[edit]

The practice, the closeness to each other's meaning and the act itself doesn't remove itself from the word. Plus the Spanish were influenced by the Arabs for a very long time. So what's the problen?

Montchevalier(Talk) 17:57, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

To start with, the word fornication is a very archaic word that reeks of moralistic self-righteousness. A neutral point of view is one of the pillars of all the Wikimedia projects, so such implied opinions should be avoided. What's more, mut'ah seems to be practiced only by Shi'ites (and not by all of them), so I have my doubts that anyone in Spain during the period in question would have even heard of it. The superficial similarity of two words and the vague association in your mind of the two concepts just isn't enough to justify adding it to an etymology. Do have any references showing any serious scholar entertaining the idea, or is it something you came up with on your own? At any rate, please don't try to restore this again without some solid references to back it up. You are, of course, free to discuss this at the Etymology scriptorium, but don't be surprised if nobody buys this there, either. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:41, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
These two texts from respected authors back it.

• "A Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic" by F. Corriente. Page 514.

• "A Description and Comparative Grammar of Andalusi Arabic" by M. Fierro. Page 51.

I may sound moralistic and self-righteous, but I'm a moralistic self-righteous person with evidence. And I do have proof to back up that they had mutah's in Al-Andalus. If you can't approach evidence with an open mind, then you have no place trying to control information. Are you going to continue being this obstinate? Or is the case settled?

Would you prefer copulation? Or is the word fuck better? It doesn't change the act. They're still doing something which merits the term. You are free to dispute the evidence, but the evidence speaks for itself. Unless you have evidence that says otherwise. We'll go with what we have. Would you like to make the change or shall I?

Montchevalier (talk) 21:21, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • I note that all Romance languages have this term. Arabic-influenced Andalusian Spanish cannot explain the widespread presence of this term.
@Surjection evaluated the sources above, and apparently neither reference the term puta. Copied from [[User_talk:Surjection#Puta_evidence_in_discussion]]:

I took a look at the first reference you gave, and it doesn't mention puta anywhere on that page, so not exactly supporting your theory. If you're trying to misrepresent or falsify sources, that is not going to work. And again, you should be discussing this at WT:ES, not here, and certainly not edit warring over it in the entry. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 08:48, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

The second source does not mention puta either. — surjection ⟨?⟩ 13:30, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

I have neither resource, but out of curiosity, I poked around in Google Books.
This sounds like another case where this Zompist post may have some relevance: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? The author's conclusion: very. He provides mathematical models and a logical walkthrough, all quite compelling. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:06, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

RFV discussion: February–May 2021[edit]

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Latin puta "girl"

@Fay Freak, Brutal Russian, JohnC5, Lambiam, Mnemosientje This is the supposed etymon of Spanish puta, French putain, etc. These clearly derive from a Vulgar Latin *pūtta, which can be an expressive derivation of Latin pūta ... except that there is no pūta in Gaffiot (hence it's not a Classical or Late Latin term) and none in DMLBS (hence probably not in Medieval Latin); see [1]. Du Cange has puta "meretrix, scortum" (i.e. prostitute) but I'm not sure how trustworthy this is; the only reference is to a glossary that defines it as "putain", and all the given quotes are in French. Gaffiot does have pūsa "petite fille" as well as pūsus "petit garçon" and pŭtus "petit garçon". (On a different note, see also my entry just above for poēmārium, for which I didn't ping anyone.) Benwing2 (talk) 21:12, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Benwing2: Also not in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, the P section is only a quarter of a century old, from a sex-positive age, in which they did not forget to mention even corrupt unlikely attestations, so we can affirm this word is completely unseen in the texts from antiquity. Thereon, it is quite a superfluous word to be borrowed from Romance into Neo-Latin, as scortum and meretrīx totally suffice, additionally this word would be too homonymic with puta (“for instance”) and forms of putāre (“to reckon”) so there is little chance for it to have been adopted in any later states of the Latin language, barring perhaps maccaronic, bad Latin. Fay Freak (talk) 22:04, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Basically there's a whole range of words, some but not all of which are listed under *pittus, that look too obviously similar for it to be a coincidence, but that are either rare or attested as (quasi)-hapaxes or in glosses. The pŭtus of L&S and hence Gaffiot is merely a conjecture in Virgil Catalepton 7.2 where the PHI edition reads differently (a Greek name for "desire", certainly the preferrable reading considering the epigram's ending). Nevertheless it's found its way into De Vaan as a headword because it perfectly matches the reconstructed base root of some certain Latin cognates mentioned under pusillus. I also remember reading, here or elsewhere, attempts at connecting puer with pūrus instead of paucus, which would mirror the relationship between putus "purified" and *putus "child". puta would then appear to simply be the feminine version of the latter, and under this assumption it's even given unasterisked in a few Google results. — FEW (pute 3., p. 634) derives putain, pute from pūtidus and not from putus (“small/clean”), something that I was inclining to already on my own.
All in all put- "child" is not an attested word in both genders, but there's a plethora of derivations from some such root *put- *pit- *pitz- *pūtt all tending to the meaning "small" that can't be reduced to any single etymon. It seems they were all used in Late Latin similar to the many and various names for "boy" in Italian dialects (and further in Romance), but rarely if at all made it into written documents. Without reading any dedicated articles it would seem a good idea to altogether remove the nouns putus and puta, as well as the "vulgar latin" thing over there conflating everything that can be conflated, and to limit ourselves with crosslinking the different words in the etymology section. Maybe I'll have different thoughts if I decide to milk google for some dedicated articles. Neither of the three DÉRom issues released so far contains the word. Brutal Russian (talk) 22:38, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, there's even a worse case of ineptitude in Niermeyer's Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon - puta, pota is given as putain citing a passage from Krusch's edition of Gregory of Tours that reads "Mulier quaedam filiam suam exhibuit vulneribus plenam, ut quidam vocant, potae haec causa genuerat." Then the mother proceeds to cure the "potae". Now one only needs a bit of common sense to see that what the "lesions were producing" was pūs (“pus”). Common sense didn't stop this poor soul from parrotting the inept editor and translating the passage as "this was the reason behind her becoming a prostitute (pota)'" - wtf lol? Not to mention that a word with an /u~ọ=ŭ/ couldn't have been the origin of numerous Romance forms in /u=ū/. Ah, Latin philology, where the one-eyed rule among the blind! Brutal Russian (talk) 23:01, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It's tempting to explain the "t" by some kind of relationship with Sanskrit पुत्र (putra), but there's not much in between. I wonder if that was an influence in some of the bad early guesses. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:17, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Sanskrit पुत्र (putra) is securely connected to pullus and pusillus. Brutal Russian (talk) 23:55, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]


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