perpaucus

Forms

perpaucus (feminine perpauca, neuter perpaucum); first/second-declension adjective^[1]

Etymology

It is from Latin per- (“very”) + paucus (“few, little”).^[2][3][1] De Vaan traces paucus to Proto-Italic *pauko- (“few”) and the root Proto-Indo-European *peh₂u-, which also underlies parvus (“small”).^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Terence has it first, in the Eunuchus of very few men, and split by another word in the Hecyra: “how very few lovers you would find”.^[2][5]

Semantic evolution

It means very few, or in the singular very little, and the neuter plural perpauca is very few things, as when Horace speaks of saying very little.^[2][1] The TLL finds it only in single passages in poetry, in Terence, Lucretius and Horace's Satires, but often in the prose of Cicero, Caesar and Livy, and rarely after them;^[3] Columella has a superlative.^[3] Manuscripts sometimes confuse it with paucus.^[3] Church Latin glosses it very little or very few.^[6]

Timeline

• 190–159 BC – Terence of very few men.^[2][5]
• 81–43 BC – Cicero of very few changes.^[2][5]
• 59 BC–17 AD – Livy of very few senators.^[2][5]
• 1st century AD – Columella uses a superlative.^[3][5]

Meanings

Adjective

1. Very few; very little.^[2][6][1]
2. Neuter plural as a noun: very few things.^[2]

Word family

• perpauculus

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 Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
3. ^ a b c d e Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
4. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
5. ^ a b c d e Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
6. ^ a b Stelten, Leo F. (1995), Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson