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--- On Fri, 12/3/10, Carl Edlund Anderson <cea@hidden.email> wrote:
> > Spanish does still have "el can", though its usage is restricted.
> I only discovered Spanish had this word ("can") when a film with the
> Spanish title "Supercan" (presumably "Superdog", in English
> distribution?) came out a few years ago!
Indeed! I don't think it would be generally understood; or at least,
people might look at you kind of weird.
Spanish does hang on to a lot of old words, and does a good job at
reengineering old words that have disappeared due to sound shift.
Thus you get pairs like hogar / fogar and hoja / foja, where the Latin
f- had become h- in Spanish, but someone (presumably some scholar or
other) felt that there was a need for reintroducing the f-. But obviously
not retaining the actual Latin word that went with it.
Padraic
> Cheers,
> Carl