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--- On Sat, 2/2/13, BPJ <bpj@hidden.email> wrote: >>> Maybe if 'frèrité' would have been composed in French times, not >>> developed progressively from Latin, there would not have been a word >>> descending from 'fraternus'. > >> Possibly. Or possibly not. French etymology makes wandering in king >> Minos's labyrinth like an afternoon at Hampton Court! > > :-) I wonder if anyone has even tried to unravel the various > layers of inherited words and loans and re-loans from other > Romance languages, not to mention dialect mixture at least > in term of rule-of-thumb statistics. That I don't know, but wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a lòt of such interchange. > Some book I read invoked (maybe correctly) dialect loans at > every turn. Better safe than sorry? ;) >>> Frerity looks like a real English word. > >> It is! Or would be if we'd borrowed French frèrité! I don't think this >> is a valid French word, though google returns a couple hits for it. > > Ain't any French, Latin or Greek word a potential English word? ;-) Verily! Philologers used to spend a lot of time trying to find the one true mother tongue from which all other languages descend. It used to be Sanskrit or Hebrew or Sumerian or whatever. What they did not see and did not look for is the one true bastard-child language which has all other languages as its parents. And that of course is English! English is indeed the one language that will find them, the one language that will bring them all together and in the darkness bind them. Padraic > /Bendetx