baratar

Forms

baratar (first-person singular present barato, first-person singular preterite baraté, past participle baratado)^[1] Old Spanish texts also write varatar.^[2]

Etymology

Its origin is uncertain.^[3][4] It is an old verb shared by all the Romance languages of Iberia, Gaul and Italy, with the basic sense “to trade”: Old Galician-Portuguese baratar, Catalan baratar “to exchange”, Old Occitan baratar (12th century), Old French barater (“to trade; to cheat”) (from the 12th century) and Italian barattare (“to cheat; to trade, barter”) (c. 1300).^[4] Corominas thinks it probably pre-Roman and perhaps Celtic.^[4] He finds Thurneysen's comparison with Old Irish mrath (“fraud, treachery”), Middle Irish brath, Breton barad (“perfidy, treason”) and Welsh brad (“treachery, deceit”) the hardest to refute, though the Celtic forms go back to Proto-Celtic *mratos, later with /b/, and lack the double /t/ that the Romance forms require.^[4] García de Diego and DICCA-XV also give a Celtic origin.^[5][6] The sense would have passed from “deceive” to “talk someone into a deal”, and then to “barter, trade”, as German Tausch (“exchange”) comes from täuschen (“to deceive”).^[4]

Corominas rejects Diez's Ancient Greek πράττω (práttō, “to do; to transact”) for its sounds, and Old Norse barátta (“fight, strife”), which could explain only the rare senses “noise, quarrel” and is confined to North Germanic.^[4] Wiktionary instead traces the Spanish word back to barateor (“swindler”), and compares English barter.^[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

The DEMel's first records are in the Fazienda de Ultramar (1200–1250), and Corominas dates the verb from the Libro de Alexandre and Calila e Dimna, of the mid-13th century.^[2][4] In the phrase baratar bien or mal it meant “to make a good or bad bargain”, and so “to fare well or badly”: the Alexandre says of the soldiers who went over to the Greeks nunca en este siglo atan mal barataron “never in this world did they fare so badly”.^[4][7]

Semantic evolution

In Alfonso X's prose the verb also meant “to have intercourse” (the Judizios de las estrellas, 1254) and “to win at tables” (1283).^[8] Later senses were “to alter the price of something to get money” (1455), “to obtain as profit” (1539) and “to barter”.^[4] Nebrija (c. 1495) rendered it with versuram facio “I borrow to pay a debt”, and Percyvall (1591) with “to sell cheap” and “to deceive”.^[9][10] In the Americas Fernández de Oviedo wrote of natives who baratan gold dust for other goods (1548).^[11]

The verb became obsolete in the 17th century, while its derivatives lived on.^[4] Autoridades (1726) still gave “to exchange” with examples from the laws and Góngora, but the Academy marked it as old from 1770.^[12][13] The phrase baratar mal fused into malbaratar (1614).^[4]

Timeline

• 1200–1250 – the Fazienda de Ultramar, the first records in the DEMel.^[2]
• mid-13th century – the Libro de Alexandre and Calila e Dimna, the DCECH's first records.^[4]
• 1254 – the Judizios de las estrellas use it for intercourse.^[8]
• 1283 – Alfonso X's book of games uses it for winning at tables.^[8]
• 1330–1343 – Juan Ruiz uses it in the Libro de buen amor.^[14]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija: versuram facio.^[9]
• 1548 – first record in the Americas, at Santo Domingo.^[11]
• 1614 – malbaratar is first recorded.^[4]
• 1770 – the Academy marks the verb as obsolete.^[13]

Meanings

Verb

1. (obsolete, transitive) To barter, exchange one thing for another (trocar).^[3][1]
2. (obsolete, transitive) To trade, buying and selling; to give or receive something below its usual price.^[3][15]
3. (obsolete, intransitive) To act, proceed.^[3]

Word family

• baratija
• malbaratar
• barato
• barata
• baratero
• desbaratar

Related words

• disparate
• Italian barattare
• English barter

Usage notes

The phrases baratar bien and baratar mal “to make a good or bad bargain; to act well or badly” were common in Old Spanish.^[4][7]

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. baratar
3. ^ a b c d Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. baratar
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 1, 501
5. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 919
6. ^ Lleal, Coloma (dir.), DICCA-XV: Diccionario del castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, Grup d'Estudis d'Història de la Llengua (GHCL), https://ghcl.ub.edu/diccaxv, p. s.v. baratar
7. ^ a b Cejador y Frauca, Julio (1929), Vocabulario medieval castellano, Madrid: Librería y Casa Editorial Hernando, p. 84
8. ^ a b c Kasten, Lloyd A.; Nitti, John J.; Gago Jover, Francisco (2002–), Diccionario de la prosa castellana del Rey Alfonso X, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (electronic edition 2024), p. s.v. baratar
9. ^ a b Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 301
10. ^ Percyvall, Richard (1591), Bibliothecae Hispanicae pars altera: containing a dictionarie in Spanish, English and Latine, London: John Jackson for Richard Watkins, p. 76
11. ^ a b Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. baratar
12. ^ Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 1, 551
13. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1770), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 2nd ed., vol. I: A–B, Madrid: Joachín Ibarra, p. 1, 441
14. ^ Boggs, R. S.; Kasten, Lloyd; Keniston, Hayward; Richardson, H. B. (1946), Tentative Dictionary of Medieval Spanish, 2 vols., Chapel Hill, N.C., p. 69
15. ^ Real Academia Española (2001), Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, p. s.v. baratar