Hello everyone,
I am a retired biologist who used to have access to Latin experts who helped devise new names for scientific concepts. I still have concepts that I would like to name rationally, but have not begun my long-awaited study of Latin, so I come to you. I need the correct ending to a word which will change a word similar to “patricide,” into a word similar to “one who commits patricide.” Is there such a thing? How would I find endings like it in the future?
I won’t take anymore of your time. Thanks in advance for any help.
Sincerely,
Briony
In English, the word patricide means both.
Oedipus is a patricide because he killed his own father.
Oedipus commited patricide on the road to Thebes.
In Latin there are two words, patricidium for the act and patricida for the person doing it.
Greek too, with both found in Homer:
πατροφονεύς – murderer of one’s father
πατροφόνος – murder of one’s father
The Greek term is much more immediate than the English. The difference between “father-killer” and “patricide” in English, I would guess. I assume the same is true of Latin? My Latin isn’t good enough to tell. Whatever is said in Latin seems to comes out sounding sonorous.
Latin is also obvious.
Patr- for father
-cidium for “cædere”, to chop, or kill.
It’s a frequent element. Homicide, regicide, deicide, all transparent from a Latin point of view.
Latin doesn’t really have the word *patricīda / *patricīdium. The original word was pāricīda/parricīda of doubtful etymology. I found words like mātricīda, homicīda (stem homin- < *homon-!), sorōricīda, tyrannicīda (Cicero has τυραννοκτόνος), utricīda (obvious jocular, apud Apuleium), dominicīda (Gr κυριοκτόνος), frātricīda, hospiticīda (Gr ξενοκτόνος), and īnfanticīda. The oldest of these is (as suggested) parricīda, but even it is possibly not very old, as syncope **parcīda might be expected with the accent on the first syllable (as Latin had before its classical stage [cf. de Vaan]).
English will of course have words already enumerated and more, like suicide and pesticide, and the OED even lists birdicide, mainly as an example of quite “ludicrous” free derivation.
The Latin stem verb for -cīda is caedere ‘to smite; to slay’.
Ah! Thanks. I was misled by familiarity, all the more embarrassing since Portuguese kept the Latin word, and we say parricida, not *patricida.
Why would you say the etymology is considered disputed? It seems pretty straightforward, but I’m guessing there’s more to it than meets the eye.
parricida must have become patricida at some point. Already by Cicero’s time? though Quintilian knew better.
—But Briony, to your question: as anphph’s original reply indicated, the –(i)cide ending can denote the agent as well as the act. Spermicide, for instance (a Greek-Latin mongrel, like television): just as a patricide commits patricide, a spermicide commits spermicide.
That may or may not be useful to you. It can hardly be extended to genocide (another hybrid formation).
Michael
According to Lewis & Short, par(r)icida probably came from patricida. Then, at a certain point, it must have reverted.
I wouldn’t expect parricida to derive from *patricida, which as a Latin word is (as I said) at the very least questionable (uariae lectiones, i.e. scribal errors). Besides, which one is more original, paricida or parricida? Walde says paricida referring to inscriptions. The Doric παός < *πασός has been suggested, but why would it suddenly be used here as this word is unknown in Latin?
Quintilian knew better? When it comes to etymological ponderings, the ancients often didn’t know better than we, as exemplified by Plato’s Cratylus.
The word parricida has rather neologistically been borrowed from Latin to Portuguese, hasn’t it? The scholars of Iberian languages speak of semicultisms, which is quite a nice word.
The word parricida has rather neologistically been borrowed from Latin to Portuguese, hasn’t it? The scholars of Iberian languages speak of semicultisms, which is quite a nice word.
We call it derivação culta, which while in most cases is indistinguishable from regular etymological origin, sometimes it leads to the same word being present in the language twice, like καθέδρα > cathĕdra > cathēdra > ca’deira (chair), and then sometime in the Renaissance cathĕdra > 'cátedra (a university office)
I too don’t believe that parricida derived from patricida (how could it?—bedwere, you’d be better off with the OLD than with L&S), but I don’t think my opposite suggestion that it became patricida should be dismissed out of hand. It’s usually used as if it were patricida, and the orthographic difference is minimal. What I meant by saying “Quintilian knew better” was that he recognized that parricida could apply also to the killer of a brother (OLD 1 b), whereas for Cicero it had not (OLD s.v. patricida: Cic. had listed fratricida and sororicida alongside). So it seems reasonable to suspect that Cicero wrote not parricida but patricida in that context—and in others?
—Only now that I actually look at the Quint. passage (8.6.35) it’s clear that he too thought that parricida properly meant patricide, the extension to other family members being by catachresis (abusio). He understood parricida as if it were patricida—or was patricida actually the word he was familiar with?
Well, perhaps patricida was a word in Latin. But ThlL cites very little on patricida with much var. l., which means at the very least, I think, that it was a really strange word.
Maybe it was a word coined by Cicero with no true currency? “fratricidax” above must be an error in OCR (optical character recognition) (I use electronic ThlL).
Servius’ note on fratricidax reads ‘’The word combines fratricida and edax. The reference is to Romulus, who is said to have killed his brother Remus and then eaten him (‘qui dicitur Remum fratrem caesum edisse’), either in order to gain his powers or because food was in short supply; for some say this, others that.”