sentement

Forms

sentement m^[1]

• santement^[2][3]

The corpora have sentement most often, with the plural sentemenz and a few cases of santement and of sentiment.^[2]

Etymology

It is formed from Old French sentir + -ment, the verb “to feel” with the suffix of action nouns.^[4][5] Gamillscheg describes it as a Gallo-Roman verbal noun Vulgar Latin *sentimentum of Latin sentiō (“to feel”).^[6] It is the source of French sentiment, whose form was remade in the 14th century after the vowel of sentir.^[6][7]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first records are two religious translations of the end of the 12th century: the sermons of Gregory on Ezekiel, a Lorraine text, where the word means knowledge of something, and the sermons of Saint Bernard, where it means bodily sensation.^[8][7][9] The Bernard passage says that compassion overcame in the saint lo sentement del corporiien torment “the feeling of bodily torment”.^[4][7]

Semantic evolution

From the start the word covered both the senses and the mind: Tobler–Lommatzsch lists feeling and the feeling of love, sensation, a sense of responsibility, knowledge or insight, and the meaning of a text.^[1] In love poetry a cançon de sentement is a song of feeling.^[1] Middle French added “smell”, from 1452, and kept “intelligence”, “opinion” and “idea” in the late 14th and early 15th centuries.^[7][10]

The form sentiment appears in 1314 in Henri de Mondeville's surgery,^[7] and the older sentement competed with it into the 16th century.^[6] English took the word as sentement in the late 14th century; the modern sense and spelling of sentiment came again from French in the 17th century.^[3]

Timeline

• 1185–1200 – the sermons of Gregory on Ezekiel, “knowledge”.^[8][7]
• c. 1190 – the sermons of Saint Bernard, “bodily sensation”.^[9][11][7]
• 1212 – the first Anglo-Norman record.^[12]
• late 13th century – perdre le sentement “to lose feeling” of the limbs, in the Miracles of Saint Louis.^[7]
• 1314 – the form sentiment, in Henri de Mondeville.^[7]

Meanings

Noun

1. the faculty of sensation; perception through the senses.^[12][7]
2. feeling, emotion, especially the feeling of love.^[1][12]
3. knowledge, insight.^[1][7]
4. a sense of responsibility.^[1]
5. the sense or meaning (of words).^[1]
6. the sense of smell; smelling.^[12]

Anglo-Norman

The AND first cites the word from 1212, with the senses “faculty of sensation”, “sense of smell”, “sensation, feeling” and “perceiving by smell”.^[12] Middle English sentement “personal experience, one's own feeling” came from the Old French word, with Medieval Latin sentimentum beside it.^[3]

Descendants

• Middle French sentement (→ French sentiment)^[10][6]
• Middle English sentement (borrowed; → English sentiment)^[3]

Related words

• sentir

Usage notes

Tobler–Lommatzsch, Godefroy's Complément, the AND and the DMF head the word sentement;^{[1][13][12][10]} the TLFi treats it under sentiment.^[7]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h Tobler, Adolf; Lommatzsch, Erhard (1925–2002), Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, 11 vols., Berlin / Wiesbaden / Stuttgart: Weidmann / Steiner, p. 9:470
2. ^ a b FROLEX 3.0, lexique morphologique du français médiéval (IXe–XVe s.), Base de français médiéval, ENS de Lyon (from the BFM, the Nouveau Corpus d'Amsterdam and the DMF), github.com/sheiden/Medieval-French-Language-Toolkit
3. ^ a b c d Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b Wiktionnaire (French Wiktionary), fr.wiktionary.org
5. ^ Wartburg, Walther von, et al. (1922–2002), Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 25 vols., Bonn / Leipzig / Basel: Klopp / Teubner / Zbinden, p. 11:469
6. ^ a b c d Gamillscheg, Ernst (1966–1969), Etymologisches Wörterbuch der französischen Sprache, 2nd, fully revised ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 852
7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Trésor de la langue française informatisé (2004), ATILF – CNRS & Université de Lorraine, atilf.fr/tlfi; electronic version of Imbs, Paul; Quemada, Bernard, eds. (1971–1994), Trésor de la langue française, Paris: CNRS / Gallimard
8. ^ a b Möhren, Frankwalt, Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français (DEAF): Complément bibliographique, electronic version (DEAFBiblEl), Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, alma.hadw-bw.de/deafbibl (texts by siglum, with their dates), p. GregEzH
9. ^ a b Greimas, Algirdas Julien (1979), Dictionnaire de l'ancien français jusqu'au milieu du XIVe siècle, 2nd ed., Paris: Larousse (printing of 1988), p. s.v. sentement
10. ^ a b c Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, version 2015 (DMF 2015), ATILF – CNRS & Université de Lorraine, atilf.fr/dmf, p. s.v. sentement
11. ^ Penn Parsed Corpus of Historical French, version 1.0, University of Pennsylvania & University of Ottawa (texts by file name), p. 1190-SBernAn-bfm-p
12. ^ a b c d e f Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND2), Aberystwyth University, anglo-norman.net (2nd ed., 2005–), p. s.v. sentement
13. ^ Godefroy, Frédéric (1881–1902), Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle, 10 vols., Paris: Vieweg / Bouillon, p. 10:661