Friday, April 11, 2008

THE WEIRDNESS IN THE NOUN

Spanish English
An italian bizarre is easily angered, a Spanish bizarre is one day brave and the other generous and lucid; the french and english bizarres according to the dictionary are weird and excentric; and now, get puzzled, a vasque bizarre is considered to be a man with beard or hair along his body (according to Baltasar de Echaue, who assured that the noun came from the vasque vicarra )
How can such a change in the meaning of the word happen from some countries to the others? The easiest explanation I have found is the following: the Spanish conquerors in the Netherlands -brave, generous, and many of them even with beard, hair on their bodies and from the vasque country - for their art and smartness in the way they wore their armours, received the adjective of “bizarre”; on the contrary, for those inhabitants of the Netherlands, who may not have the same opinion about their look and elegance, they understood under this “bizarrity” extravagance, excentricity or weirdness, reason for which the word came to be, from “bizarro” in Spanish, something different in the french and english “bizarre”.Don´t your trust me? Well in fact, that has been send in a comment by a visitor to an argentinian web site, created by a priest from Buenos Aires, who once learned French (the one who posted the comment, not the priest) and his teacher gave the same explanation which I have just giving above. How realiable is this? Internet 100%.

1 comment:

belenmadrid said...

Yeah, sure, if it's in the Net, has to be true :P