Piwin -> RE: Can a white man play the blues? (Apr. 28 2021 19:54:32)
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Short answer: just put it in the pile with all the other maybes. [8D] "Flamenco" is to etymology what "copla" is to flamenco. Just put anything you want in it. ^^ Caveats first: I'm not an etymologist and I'm just reacting after a first reading of the article. I'd be curious to know what these "linguistic grounds" for readily dismissing "fellah mengus" are. I don't know what those could be. Perhaps comparative cases where they see that words with that kind of ending went from Arabic to Spanish but ended up with different kinds of ending than -enco? Dunno. To me the case against it was more on historical grounds than on linguistic ones. I'm careful with the "linguistic grounds" argument, because the literature is ripe with examples of scholars saying "X can't happen because Y", only to be shown a few years later that it actually can, and did, happen. Ultimately his thesis has the same problem as all the others: there is no shortage of etymologies that make perfect sense linguistically, and since the word seemingly pops out of nowhere, then we're left speculating about undocumented words and how they may or may not have evolved. Since he's relating it to germanía, I'll say this: there's plenty of scholarship that relates that term to the Catalan germá (brothers), and not to the German ethnonym. There are plenty of historical occurrences of that term, probably the most famous of which is the rebellion of the Germanías in Valencia. The term goes back to the Latin germanus, meaning brothers (which gave us words like germain in French or germane in English). The Latin for German seems to have been a loan word taken from some Northern tribes and bears no connection to the Latin word for brothers. Point being that there's a sort of consistency in all of these theories, that if they opt for one particular origin of the word "flamenco", they're going to also reach pre-defined conclusions on the origin of other words. So if you think "flamenco" comes from the Flemish ethnonym, you're likely to gloss over the possible Catalan origin of Germanía and instead see it as rooted in the German ethnonym, exactly like Borrows did. It sometimes leads to very bizarre conclusions. Like, for instance, this idea that the "Roman de Flamenca" somehow had some connection to Flemings because skin colour. I guess, but man that's a stretch. The book predates the political presence of Flemings in Southern Europe by several centuries, yet we are somehow to believe that it was already a term used to describe people of fair skin based on the Flemish ethnonym. Similarly, this article says that the fla- of flamma was retained in certain Andalusian dialects, whereas in most Castilian dialects it shifted to lla-, which he then uses to explain why the pha- of phabarel turned into fla-. OK, fair enough. But fla- was also retained in Catalan, both North and South, and it also has the advantage of neatly explaining the -enc suffix (with quite a few examples of -enc words turning into -enco/-enca in Castilian). The point isn't to say he's necessarily wrong. It's just to point out that there's a sort of consistency in what possibilities they dismiss. Meaning that since he dismisses Catalan influence out of hand, then of course Germanía to him can't possibly come from Catalan either, despite strong evidence to the contrary. I'd be really funny if that origin of the word flamenco turned out to be true. Unlikely, but man I'd love to see that revenge of the rumberos moment lol ^^ Related to that, footnote 20 is rather telling. Since he's making a case for this kind of encrypted "secret" language, he cites somebody saying that distorting "a foreign language's name" is common in such languages. I guess, and I don't know about the other examples he cites, but to relate the French "Bohémiens" to cryptic slang is AFAIK incorrect. There was nothing cryptic about that, it wasn't some kind of in-group signal. It followed the exact same rationale as "Gypsies": namely, people thought these Roma came from those regions, i.e. Bohemia in the case of "Bohémiens" and Egypt in the case of "Gypsies", and that's it. So yeah, just a tendency to gloss over certain things and overgeneralise in a way that would support his own argument. Anyway, I'm not dismissing his theory more than any other. Ultimately its value is that it opens up new possibilities that can then be refined, but as is it's not particularly convincing to me, nor does it seem to me to be more plausible than other theories. Dunno. As long as there's this lack of documentation, I think a lot of that work of refinement will have to be less about "flamenco" per se and more about clarifying other terms. For instance, if I really wanted to put an Occitan/Catalan origin to rest, it would be helpful if they could explain why the Kalderash of pelota land called their Southern brethren "red-legs" (I forget the exact word but that's what it translates to). There's no morphological or etymological connection to "flamenco" there at all. As you know, Basque is a language isolate. But for some reason there's that colour again, which would also be involved in a Romance origin of the term. I guess in a way it means trying to chip away at the number of unrelated coincidences there would be for any given etymology of the term. And what I'm seeing is that many of these scholars are very good at multiplying the coincidences, but not so good at reducing their numbers. edit: also, Grisha is flamenco, and estebanana's mother was a hamster and his father smelled of elderberries. ^^
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