I have a friend who occasionally sends me audio clips in foreign languages to try and identify, knowing that I enjoy the challenge, and the last one I ID’d turned out to be the Canción del grumete. There are a couple of interesting words there, both of which I had forgotten (I haven’t actually used Spanish for many years): rizo ‘curl, lock (of hair)’ is from erizo ‘hedgehog,’ from Latin ēricius, but the one that really tickled me is the titular grumete ‘cabin boy,’ which is:
Borrowed from Catalan grumet, from Old French groumet (“valet, servant”), from Middle English grome [i.e., groom]. Cognate of English gourmet.
When I shared that last tidbit with my friend, who likes to eat, he responded “lucky cabin boy.”
The RAE is less certain of the etymology. “etim. disc.”. I assume etim. is etymology and
disc. is discutido, controversial.
A Chilean website has a different view. https://etimologias.dechile.net/?grumete
that traces it to English groom, and old French grommet.
The most fun, though likely wrong, is in the Diccionario deAutoridades, 1726-1739.
Enter the word in the search box on the left, press Enter.
https://apps2.rae.es/DA.html
“Covarr. siente pudo haberse formado del nombre Gúmena, interpuesta una r quasi Grumenete”: yes, implausible in the extreme but fun!
Any relation to Gromit (as in Wallace and)?
In Mexico the common word for ‘curl, lock (of hair)’ is chino and curly-haired men and women are called chino(s) and china(s). This is distinct from the general Spanish word for Chinese person, also chino/china.
The Spanish name for sea urchins is erizos de mar.
And urchin is also a descendant of Latin ericius.
I wonder if the colloquial street urchin derives from hedgehog, based on unruly appearance.
Any relation to Gromit (as in Wallace and)?
We have, of course, discussed that.
Both the “street urchin” and “sea urchin” senses were formed by metaphorical extensions of the “hedgehog” sense of urchin. This last, while Latinate, is quite old in English (manifestly not adopted from Modern French), and it was used promiscuously for all spined mammals, not just hedgehogs but also Old World porcupines. In fact, the etymologcally transparent term porcupine first appears in English circa 1400 (somewhat earlier in Romance), but it really took off in the seventeenth century, with exposure to the far more ubiquitous New World porcupines.
Wiktionary: “From Middle English yrchoun, irchoun (“hedgehog; sea urchin”), from Old Northern French irechon, from Vulgar Latin *ērīciōnem, from Latin ericius. Compare modern French hérisson, whence the English doublet herisson.”
And herisson means: “1. A beam or bar armed with iron spikes, and turning on a pivot, used to block up a passage. 2. (heraldry) A hedgehog.”
It isn’t any easier on the French side, where hérisson is: “Inherited from Old French heriçun, heriçon, from a hypothetical Old French *eriz, from Latin erīcius (“hedgehog”), with the suffix –on added later; ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰḗr. Another possibility may be a Vulgar Latin root *ērīcio, ērīciōnem, but this would have seemingly produced *erçon in Old French. Compare, however, Catalan eriçó and Romansch erizun. See also oursin.”
That last one means “sea urchin” and is its own mess: “The first attestation of the word (1549) is Provençal orsin de mar, compare with its French synonym hérisson de mer. The Provençal orsin may actually originally derive from ors (“bear”) or Latin ursīnus, with French oursin likewise from ours (“bear”), or an adaptation of the Provençal. It may have been contaminated with hérisson (cf. Provençal eriçon) and related terms, which are closer semantic fits. Compare also Portuguese ouriço-do-mar, Italian riccio di mare, Spanish erizo de mar, Catalan eriçó de mar (dialectal oriç), English urchin or hurcheon all deriving from Latin ericius which also gives French hérisson.”
There’s no mention of where the h aspiré of hérisson comes from. I’m not aware of a Germanic word it could have been confused with; the German for “hedgehog” is Igel, of impeccable PIE pedigree. And “sea urchin” is Seeigel, but I have no idea how old that is.
Hurchins and manticores, ’tis ten years since.
Mooré has yʋ́gempende “hedgehog” (where pende is “arrow”) beside yʋ́gemdé “camel.”
Tempting as it is to ask just what it is about hedgehogs that reminds the Mossi of camels, sadly, this is pure coincidence. The “camel” word is a very old loan, ultimately from Berber (unsurprisingly.)
“Grommet” in the sense of cabin boy is equally an English word:
“The second definition for grommet provided by the Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea [2d ed 2007] is “gromet or grummett: from the medieval Latin gromettus, a youth or servant in the British Navy. Gromets ranked above ship’s boys and below ordinary seamen.” . . . A further Google search provides this quote from A Descriptive Catalogue of the Naval Manuscripts in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College – “In every ship 21 men and a garcion or boy, which is called a Gromet’ The word is derived from the Dutch grom, or Low Latin gromettus, one occupied in a servile office.”
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/194188/why-is-a-young-surfer-called-a-grommet-or-a-grom
The question under discussion, interestingly, is “Why is a novice surfer called a grommet?” which was news to me.
And “sea urchin” is Seeigel, but I have no idea how old that is
The attestations at DWB are from the late 18th / early 19th century, so not very old, and to me the word looks like a scholarly calque from French. Neither my Duden Etymologisches Wörterbuch nor my Kluge-Seebold have the word, probably because it’s a transparent compound.
Wiktionary’s gotten itself into an infinite loop: it says Spanish grumete is “Borrowed from Catalan grumet”, while Catalan grumet is “Borrowed from Spanish grumete”. Heh. More plausibly, both Spanish and Catalan could have gotten it directly from French; I think that’s what Corominas says for grumet in his Catalan dictionary (via machine translation — correct me if I’ve misunderstood).
From the Corominas entry for grumet: https://decat.iec.cat/llista_termes.asp?limit=1&terme=grumet&button=Cercar
“l’origen últim és incert”. the ultimate origen is uncertain.
It goes on to say that English grom (now groom) and Dutch grom may be
either Germanic or of French origen.
So, yes, they could have gotten it from French, or not.
He begins the entry by saying that grumet derives from old French gromet.
@ktschwarz: That’s “etymology hell.”
The street urchin moved to America, and his descendants are skate rats.
The diminutive form grommet was apparently formed in French from Middle French gourme ‘servant, personal attendant’, per the OED’s etymology (revised 2023). They leave it unsolved as to whether gourme comes from groom, or has a common origin, but reject the Dutch word:
(The authors of the Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, despite publishing with Oxford, don’t seem to have looked at the OED, which would have told them that medieval Latin gromettus is just a Latinization of the French word. Just because it’s in a Latin text doesn’t mean it’s old or original.)
The “young surfer” sense (originally Australian) appeared in the OED’s Additions in 1993 as a new sense of this old word, which I think is much more plausible than any Romance borrowing theory. The old sense of “cabin boy” is obscure now, but maybe it survived in some pocket of nautical English long enough to be transmitted to surfers in Australia.