verbo

Forms

verbo m (plural verbos)^[1] Old Spanish mostly wrote vierbo (also biervo), beside verbo in Berceo, the Libro de Alexandre and Juan Ruiz;^[2][3] Berceo also has the plural vierba.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin verbum (“word; verb”).^[2][4][5][1] The Old Spanish form vierbo alternated with verbo, and Corominas explains the wavering by the semi-learned character of the word; he doubts that any Romance language kept a truly hereditary descendant of the Latin noun, although Meyer-Lübke thought so.^[2][6] García de Diego lists the form with ⟨ie⟩ as Old Castilian and Old Navarrese and calls the modern Castilian form a learned word.^[7] In the sense “part of speech” it has been a purely learned word since Alfonso de Palencia and Nebrija.^[2]

Latin had the grammatical sense as a semantic loan from Ancient Greek ῥῆμα (rhêma, “word; verb”), and Christian Latin used the noun for the Word of God as a calque of λόγος (lógos).^[1][8] The learned word is also Portuguese verbo, Catalan verb, French verbe and Italian verbo.^[9] The Latin plural, taken as a feminine singular Vulgar Latin *verva, gave Old French verve, first “proverb” and later “inspiration”, and the medieval Galician-Portuguese cantigas have vervo (“proverb”).^[10][2][6]

The Latin noun goes back to Proto-Italic *werðom, from Proto-Indo-European *werdʰom (“word”).^[1] De Vaan analyses it as a compound “making a statement”, with *dʰeh₁- (“to put”), and its cognates include Lithuanian var̃das (“name”), Old High German wort and English word.^[11][12]

Earliest recorded meaning

The earliest Spanish text with the word in the CDH is the Fazienda de Ultra Mar (c. 1200, in a 13th-century copy): non respondieron vierbo “they did not answer a word”.^[3] Corominas's first record is Berceo, with vierbo meaning “word, phrase”.^[2][4]

Semantic evolution

In Old Spanish the word meant a word or a saying: Alfonso X wrote vierbo a vierbo “word for word”, and in Don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor vierbo means a proverb.^[13][2] Fueros of the 13th century list vierbos vedados, forbidden insults, whose speaker had to pay a fine.^[3] The grammatical sense, “verb”, is recorded from about 1490 on.^[4][2]

The 1739 Autoridades gave three senses: the philosophers' mental word, the Word of God as the second person of the Trinity, and the part of speech conjugated by mood and tense.^[14] The Academy's 1884 edition was the first to give the etymology, “Del lat. verbum”.^[15] Modern Spanish keeps the old sense “word, language” in literary use, and echar verbos means to swear or curse.^[5][16] In Venezuela verbo has meant a great number or variety, as in verbo de ganado “all kinds of livestock”.^[17]

Timeline

• c. 1200 – vierbo “word” in the Fazienda de Ultra Mar (in a 13th-century copy).^[3]
• 1220–1250 – Berceo uses vierbo and verbo for “word, phrase”.^[4][2]
• 1272–1275 – Alfonso X's General estoria has vierbo a vierbo “word for word”.^[13]
• c. 1490 – first record in the grammatical sense, in Alfonso de Palencia.^[4][2]
• 1571 – first record from the Americas, in Mexico City.^[18]
• 1739 – the Diccionario de Autoridades records the philosophical, theological and grammatical senses.^[14]
• 1884 – the Academy's dictionary gives the etymology for the first time.^[15]

Meanings

Noun

1. (grammar) A verb: the class of words that inflect for person, number, tense, mood and aspect, and each word of that class: Ese verbo es irregular en el pretérito.^[5][1]
2. (literary) A sound or sounds that express an idea; word, language, way of speaking: un orador de verbo encendido.^[5][16]
3. An oath or curse, in echar verbos.^[5][16]
4. (Christianity) el Verbo: the Word, the second person of the Trinity (Trinidad).^[5][14]
5. (Venezuela) A great number or variety of something.^[17]

Word family

• verbal
• verboso
• verbosidad
• verbalismo
• verborrea
• deverbal
• postverbal

Related words

• adverbio
• proverbio
• verbigracia
• Latin verbum
• Portuguese verbo

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 5, 780
3. ^ a b c d e Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. verbo
4. ^ a b c d e Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. verbo
5. ^ a b c d e f 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. verbo
6. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 9223
7. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 7092
8. ^ Bénaben, Michel (2000), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'espagnol, Paris: Ellipses, p. s.v. verbo
9. ^ Wikcionario (Spanish Wiktionary), es.wiktionary.org, p. s.v. verbo
10. ^ Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert, p. s.v. verve
11. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
12. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
13. ^ 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. verbo
14. ^ a b c Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 6, 458
15. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 1081
16. ^ a b c Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. verbo
17. ^ a b Malaret, Augusto (1946), Diccionario de americanismos, 3rd ed., Buenos Aires: Emecé, p. 812
18. ^ 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. verbo