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Alex West
@ajw87.bsky.social
Interested in the Columbian exchange. Philology. Manuscripts. Plants. #OldSundanese #MedievalIndonesia #TupianLanguages Old site: indomedieval.medium.com/ New site: medium.com/@WestsWorld he/him
299 followers385 following320 posts
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Why does "saudade" have that spelling in the modern language, by the way? It's quite different from the way Duarte spells it and it's not what we'd expect going by the word's etymology. It should be *soidade or *soudade. Apparently there are 3 possible reasons (I always assumed it was the last one):

Text from the Wiktionary entry on the Portuguese word "saudade". The text says: "Etymology: Inherited from Old Galician-Portuguese soydade, from Latin sōlitātem, meaning “solitude”. The modern saudade may owe its irregular development to one or more of the following factors:

Analogy with Arabic سَوْدَاء (sawdāʔ, “melancholy”, literally “black bile”);
learned hypercorrection; cf. the 'vulgar' coisa alongside the Latinism causa; analogy with words such as saudar (“to wish good health”) or the archaic saudade ("salvation" < *salūtātem)""
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Alex West
@ajw87.bsky.social
Interested in the Columbian exchange. Philology. Manuscripts. Plants. #OldSundanese #MedievalIndonesia #TupianLanguages Old site: indomedieval.medium.com/ New site: medium.com/@WestsWorld he/him
299 followers385 following320 posts