légua

Forms

légua f (plural léguas)^[1] Old forms are leguas and legoa in the 13th century, leegoa and llegoa in the 15th, and leguoas in 1500.^[2][3] Wiktionary lists légoa, legoa and legua as older spellings.^[1] Vieira heads the word légua, but the quotations he gives still write legoa.^[4]

Etymology

It is inherited from Late Latin leuga (“league, a Gaulish measure of distance”), also written leuca.^[2][3][1] The Latin word named a measure of 1,500 Roman paces used in Gaul, and Roman writers already called it Gaulish.^[5][1] Cunha, Nascentes and the OLD call it Celtic, and Wiktionary traces it to Proto-Celtic *lougā.^[3][6][5][1] Houaiss and the Porto dictionary connect it with a Celtic word for “stone”, while Wiktionary's Latin entry notes that the Celtic origin is uncertain because the diphthong is secondary and the word has no clear cognates in the Insular Celtic languages.^[2][7][1]

Houaiss, following Corominas, explains the Portuguese form through Medieval Latin spellings such as leuwa, with the /ɡ/ after /u/ turned into /w/; from that /w/ came the /ɡw/ of the Portuguese word, just as Germanic /w/ gave the ⟨gu⟩ of guardar and trégua.^[2][8]

The same word is Galician legua, Spanish legua, Catalan llegua, French lieue and Old Occitan legoa, from which Italian lega was borrowed.^[9][1][10] The Spanish word is recorded from about 1140.^[11]

Earliest recorded meaning

The word is recorded from the 13th century as a measure of distance along a road, the sense Cunha gives it.^[2][3]

Semantic evolution

The league was a road measure whose length changed with the period, the country and the region: Houaiss gives about 6,600 metres for the Brazilian league and 5,572 for the Portuguese.^[2] Vieira notes that it had been officially replaced by the kilometre.^[4] After metrication a metric league of 5 kilometres was used for a time in Portugal.^[1][12]

Brazil kept the league of 3,000 braças (légua de sesmaria, 6,600 metres), still used in the countryside of Rio Grande do Sul and recorded in rural speech.^[2][13][14] From the measure came the sense of any great distance, mostly in the plural, and a number of set phrases.^[2][7]

Timeline

• 13th century – first records, as leguas and legoa.^[2][3]
• 15th century – the spellings leegoa and llegoa.^[2]
• 1500 – the spelling leguoas.^[2]
• 1558 – first record in the private letters of the Post Scriptum corpus, spelt leguõas.^[15]
• 1871–1874 – Vieira notes that the kilometre has officially replaced the league.^[4]
• 1975 – the first Aurélio gives the league as 6,000 metres and records the Brazilian légua de beiço.^[16]

Meanings

Noun

1. (historical) A league, an old measure of distance whose length varied by period and country: about 6,600 m in Brazil and 5,572 m in Portugal.^[2][1][17]
2. (historical) The metric league, a Portuguese measure of 5 km.^[1][12]
3. légua marítima: the nautical league, a twentieth of a degree of the meridian, three miles.^[2][12]
4. (Brazil) légua de sesmaria: an old measure of 3,000 braças or 6,600 m.^[2][18][13]
5. (figurative, usually plural) A great distance: Andaram léguas até encontrarem uma aldeia.^[2][7]

Related words

• Late Latin leuga
• Spanish legua

Usage notes

Set phrases: à légua or às léguas “from far off, at once” and “in great haste”, as in conhecer alguém à légua “to see through someone at once” and fugir à légua “to run off as fast as one can”;^[2][7][18] de légua e meia “very long, much longer than said”, also légua da Póvoa in Portugal; and the Brazilian légua de beiço, a vague distance shown by pushing out the lower lip, usually far longer than it sounds.^[2][7][18]

Castro records Légua (Légua Boji Buá) in the Mina-Jeje vocabulary of Brazil as a name taken from Fon Legba, unrelated to the measure.^[19]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Houaiss, Antônio; Villar, Mauro de Salles (2001), Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa, Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, p. s.v. légua
3. ^ a b c d e Cunha, Antônio Geraldo da (2010), Dicionário etimológico da língua portuguesa, 4th ed., Rio de Janeiro: Lexikon, p. s.v. légua
4. ^ a b c Vieira, Frei Domingos (1871–1874), Grande Diccionario Portuguez ou Thesouro da lingua portugueza, 5 vols., Porto: Ernesto Chardron e Bartholomeu H. de Moraes, p. 3, 1279
5. ^ a b Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. s.v. leuga
6. ^ Nascentes, Antenor (1966), Dicionário etimológico resumido, Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro, p. s.v. légua
7. ^ a b c d e Porto Editora (2013), Grande Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, Porto: Porto Editora, p. 5625
8. ^ Niermeyer, J. F. (1976), Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, Leiden: Brill, p. s.v. leuga
9. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. s.v. leuca
10. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. s.v. leuca
11. ^ Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. legua
12. ^ a b c Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa, Lisboa: Priberam Informática, https://dicionario.priberam.org, p. s.v. légua
13. ^ a b Schlee, Aldyr Garcia (2019), Dicionário da Cultura Pampeana Sul-Rio-Grandense, 2 vols., Pelotas: Fructos do Paiz, p. s.v. légua
14. ^ Instituto da Lingua Galega, Tesouro do léxico patrimonial galego e portugués (TLPGP), Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, https://ilg.usc.gal/tesouro, p. s.v. légua
15. ^ CLUL (ed.) (2014), P.S. Post Scriptum: Arquivo Digital de Escrita Quotidiana em Portugal e Espanha na Época Moderna, Lisboa: Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, http://ps.clul.ul.pt, p. s.v. légua
16. ^ Ferreira, Aurélio Buarque de Holanda (1975), Novo dicionário da língua portuguesa, 1st ed., Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, p. 850
17. ^ Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, revised online edition (2023–) of the Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa Contemporânea (2001), https://dicionario.acad-ciencias.pt, p. s.v. légua
18. ^ a b c Ferreira, Aurélio Buarque de Holanda, Novo dicionário Aurélio da língua portuguesa, digital edition, p. s.v. légua
19. ^ Castro, Yeda Pessoa de (2002), A língua mina-jeje no Brasil: um falar africano em Ouro Preto do século XVIII, Belo Horizonte: Fundação João Pinheiro, p. 209