cantor

Forms

cantor m (plural cantores, feminine cantora, feminine plural cantoras)^[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin cantor (“singer”).^[2][3][4][1] In Latin the noun is canō (“to sing”) with the agent suffix -tor, and it meant a singer who usually accompanied himself on an instrument, and in poetry also a poet.^[5][6] In Medieval Latin it was the word for a church singer and for the precentor who led the choir.^[7]

The same Latin word is Portuguese cantor, Galician cantor, Asturian cantor, Catalan cantor, Italian cantore and Romanian cantor.^[1][8] French chantre continues the Latin nominative, and chanteur the accusative.^[1][9] Spanish took the French word as its own chantre, a title of cathedral clergy, about 1260, so that Spanish has both outcomes of the Latin noun.^[10][9]

Earliest recorded meaning

The DCECH and the BDELC date the word to the Glosas Silenses of the second half of the 10th century.^[2][3] In the 13th century it meant “one who sings”: Berceo and the Libro de buen amor use it, and the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X define the cathedral chantre as a cantor whose office is to begin the responses and hymns in processions and in the choir.^[11][12]

Semantic evolution

The Diccionario de Autoridades defined the word as anyone who sings, by rule or without it, and the singers employed in a chapel choir; it also recorded the proverb ni barbero mudo, ni cantor sesudo “never a silent barber nor a sensible singer”, said because singers were thought flighty.^[13] In the thieves' cant of the Golden Age a cantor was a man who confessed under torture, a sense taken from Juan Hidalgo's vocabulary of 1609 and still in the Academy's dictionary in 1869.^[14][13][15]

From 1817 the Academy also listed an obsolete sense “composer of canticles and psalms”.^[16][4] The zoological sense, the songbirds, entered the dictionaries with Alemany in 1917, who also gave the plural cantoras as the name of the order.^[17][4] Román, in Chile, missed in the Academy's dictionary the common poetic sense “the poet who sings of something” (el cantor de Eneas), which Moliner and Vox now record.^[18][19][20] In colloquial Chilean Spanish the feminine cantora means a chamber pot.^[4][19]

Timeline

• 950–1000 – first record, in the Glosas Silenses.^[2][3]
• c. 1260 – the doublet chantre is taken from French.^[10]
• 1256–1300 – the Siete Partidas explain chantre as cantor.^[12]
• 1513 – Nebrija gives Latin cantor, cantator and psaltes as its equivalents.^[21]
• 1537 – first record from the Americas, in Cartagena.^[22]
• 1609 – Juan Hidalgo records the cant sense “one who confesses under torture”.^[14]
• 1729 – the Diccionario de Autoridades defines the word and records two proverbs about singers.^[13]
• 1884 – the Academy's dictionary first gives the etymology, from Latin cantor.^[23]
• 1917 – Alemany records the sense “songbird”.^[17]

Meanings

Noun and adjective

1. Who sings, especially as a profession; a singer: Los cantores del coro ensayan los jueves.^[4][1]
2. (zoology) Of a bird: able to produce varied, melodious sounds, as the blackbird or the nightingale do; a songbird: un pájaro cantor.^[4][19]
3. A poet who celebrates someone or something in verse: el cantor de la pampa.^[19][20]
4. (obsolete) A composer of canticles and psalms.^[4]
5. (Chile, colloquial, feminine) A chamber pot.^[4][19]

Related words

• cantar
• canto
• chantre
• Latin cantor

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 1, 812
3. ^ a b c Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. cantar
4. ^ a b c d e f g h 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. cantor
5. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ Niermeyer, J. F. (1976), Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, Leiden: Brill
8. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 1381
9. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 1619a
10. ^ a b Segura Munguía, Santiago (2001), Nuevo diccionario etimológico latín-español y de las voces derivadas, Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, p. 95
11. ^ Boggs, R. S.; Kasten, Lloyd; Keniston, Hayward; Richardson, H. B. (1946), Tentative Dictionary of Medieval Spanish, 2 vols., Chapel Hill, N.C., p. 97
12. ^ a b 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. cantor
13. ^ a b c Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 2, 127
14. ^ a b Hidalgo, Juan (1609), Romances de germanía de varios autores, con el vocabulario por la orden del a.b.c. para declaración de sus términos y lengua, Barcelona: Sebastián de Cormellas (ed. Madrid 1779), p. 166
15. ^ Real Academia Española (1869), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 11th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de Don Manuel Rivadeneyra, p. 145
16. ^ Real Academia Española (1817), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 5th ed., Madrid: Imprenta Real, p. 170
17. ^ a b Alemany y Bolufer, José (1917), Diccionario de la lengua española, Barcelona: Ramón Sopena, p. 322
18. ^ Román, Manuel Antonio (1901–1918), Diccionario de chilenismos y de otras voces y locuciones viciosas, 5 vols., Santiago de Chile: Imprenta de San José, p. 254
19. ^ a b c d e Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. cantor
20. ^ a b Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial, p. s.v. cantor
21. ^ Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 310
22. ^ 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. cantor
23. ^ Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 202