Hatters who are aware of my fanatical regard for Godard may be surprised to learn that I am also a fan of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, but such is the case, and today I watched For a Few Dollars More with a commentary track by Tim Lucas, who is a master of the form and always opens my eyes to many aspects of a movie I hadn’t known or noticed. However, in this case he made a glaring mistake that I feel it is my duty to publicly correct, so future generations of Leone fans will not be misled. In discussing the Clint Eastwood character, conventionally known as The Man With No Name, Lucas mentions that in one scene he is called Manco, adding that this is the Italian word for ‘monk.’ I grunted in muffled outrage: the word for ‘monk’ is monaco, and manco means ‘left’ (as opposed to ‘right’). What made the error particularly amusing was that Lucas went on to discuss at length the fact that, while Eastwood’s character shoots with his right hand, he does everything else with his left (possibly in an attempt to distinguish him from his character in A Fistful of Dollars, since the producer of that movie had threatened legal action if this one was presented as a sequel). Thus the name, or nickname, was appropriate, and I’m sure Lucas would have enjoyed pointing that out if he’d known.
Incidentally, the Wiktionary etymology for manco is:
From Latin mancus, from Proto-Indo-European *mh₂n-ko- (“maimed in the hand”), from *méh₂-r̥ ~ *mh₂-én- (“hand”).
Anybody know if that is plausible?
What would el manco de Lepanto think of all this?
“maimed in the hand”
Seems a curiously specific sense to have a word for. It’s not a clipping of something cognate with “main gauche”?
In Spanish un manco is a cripple, in particular, a one-armed person.
I can see where right-hand prejudice might lead to considering a lefty something of a cripple, or as someone similar to an amputee in lacking the appropriate right-hand agility.
The Catalan verb mancar means lack/be lacking. I think that’s true in Spanish as well, though I didn’t find it in google translate. I wonder whether it’s antiquated and I’m remembering it from Lazarillo de Tormes or some other medieval/early modern work. I do see Spanish meanings of to cripple or to maim. Oddly transitive way of thinking about the meaning – cripple, be crippled.
>What would el manco de Lepanto think of all this?
Maybe we can get Jean Manco to weigh in as well.
Duolingo blog on how words for “left” are often unstable and subject to replacement — e.g. Spanish took izquierda from Basque — compared to words for “right”, due to widespread cultural bias. Manco shifting from “maimed” to “left” would be another example.
I just realized that Italian mancuso ‘left-handed’ was probably intentionally the name of the hapless policeman in Confederacy of Dunces.
Hebrew has a nice example of this semantic shift. BH has אִטֵּר יַד יְמִינוֹ ʼiṭṭēr yad yǝmīnō (Judges 3:15 and 20:16), something like ‘blocked’ or ‘handicapped’ of his right hand/arm. In Mishnaic and Medieval Hebrew ʼiṭṭēr by itself has become ‘left-handed’.
The original meaning of the root is not completely clear. The Akkadian verb eṭēru means simply ‘to take away’. Soqotri has iṭéreh ‘mute’ (these from SED.) In the OT, the verb root ʾṭr occurs once, in Ps. 69:16 ‘let not the well close its mouth upon me’. The sense ‘deprived, handicapped’ would reasonably follow from the Akkadian, and fits with the Soqotri ‘mute’ and the BH ‘handicapped’ senses, but not the ‘closed’ sense in Psalms. Some lexicographers triangulate the two BH meanings to ‘blocked’, but that doesn’t follow easily from the Akk. ‘to take away’. Perhaps there is a parallel between Soqotri ‘mute’ and Psalms ‘shut (mouth)’, but that doesn’t fit well with ‘handicapped’ in Judges. Then there’s also Arabic أَطِيرٌ ʾaṭīru ‘crime, sin’ (Lane), which may or may not have some connection to all this.
The Dutch translation of Perec’s La Disparition is titled ‘t Manco, which means something like lack.
I can´t tell for sure the way it is in Italian, but in Spanish it applies to people missing an arm or a hand, be it right or left. [it also applies for animals having a damaged leg, typically horses.]
The explanation of Latin mancus from *mh₂n-ko- has been around for a while: it’s in AHD under manqué (< French manquer < Italian mancare < Latin mancus). OED has a version under mank (obsolete adjective meaning “Maimed, mutilated, defective”; also verb, “Chiefly Scottish. Now rare.”):
Wiktionary at mancus also gives an alternate theory:
PIE *menk- is a redlink; I don’t think it’s in Pokorny, but it is in Mallory/Adams, who say:
For whatever that’s worth.
There is Irish “meang” = to lop/prune, with what I think is a homonym = “to deceive”. If the original sense was to lop/prune, it could be the I.E. peoples punished criminals, prisoners or escaped slaves by cutting off right hand fingers, like the evil French did to captured English longbowmen, or even the whole hand.
My prior rhetorical question—gracias al señor que nos otorgó el Quixote—was an apparently failed effort to move the discussion from italiano to español. I have not seen a film in decades,
but assumed that a spaghetti western took place in the American southwest. Spanish is and was common there. Of course there was likely an Italian version, but the issue would be what the protagonist was called in the English language version.
Wikipedia to the rescue! Queue the William Tell overture, or if you prefer a lighter touch, the overture to Bernstein’s Candide.
“ In For a Few Dollars More (1965), he is called “Manco” (Spanish for “one-armed”; in fact, in the original Italian-language version he is called “il Monco”, a dialectal expression meaning “the One-armed one”), because he does everything left-handed, except for shooting.[12]*”
source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_with_No_Name
*12 Hughes, Howard (31 March 2006). Once Upon A Time in the Italian West: The Filmgoers’ Guide to Spaghetti Westerns. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-0-85773-045-9.
wiktionary sv “mank” has a non-obsolete homonym, via Polari, from Italian mancare (“to be lacking”), from Latin mancus (“maimed”). I am more familiar with the adjective “manky”.
Wow, great stuff, everybody!
What would el manco de Lepanto think of all this?
And let’s not forget Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca.
I don’t think it makes sense to talk about a Sergio Leone spaghetti western having an “original” language. The earliest versions of the script might have been entirely in Italian. However, the filming took place in a mix of English, Italian, and some Spanish, and most or all of the dialogue was rerecorded for both the Italian and English releases.
AFAIK, the normal procedure was for every actor to speak their own language, and then everything else was dubbed.
Yes, the shooting scripts had every character’s lines rendered in their actor’s native languages. However, many of the actors redubbed their own lines even in their original languages. Rod Steiger, for example, redubbed all his English lines in Duck, You Sucker, and while James Coburn redubbed most of his.
On the other hand, I think Henry Fonda preferred to use his lines as delivered if possible for Once Upon a Time in the West. I suspect Fonda’s stature allowed him to insist on this. (He famously hated watching his own acting, even for purposes of rerecording lines, feeling hypercritical of any imperfections in his performances.) Charles Bronson and Jason Robards, although both middle aged, had not yet reached the peaks of their fame and probably didn’t have the pull that Fonda did. They probably did not care as much either, and both of them redubbed most of their dialogue. On Robards’ case, in can be especially obvious. I suspect he was more committed to giving the best auditory acting performance than with syncing his audio with his earlier visual performance.
According to de Vaan’s Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages:
He doesn’t list any IE reconstruction, only a Proto-Italic reconstruction *manko-, labeled with a question mark.
Oh, for the love of Godard!
“I did like the synchronized lighting of the cigarettes, though.”
@ chuchuflete:
pace Wikipedia, monco is not dialectal, but the standard Italian form (possibly from a blend of manco and tronco ). On the other hand (no pun intended), manco is now literary or antiquated in the sense ‘maimed, missing something’, less so in the sense ‘left (hand)’. mancare is the basic verb for ‘to miss, lack something’.
As for the origins of Latin mancus, this recent paper derives it from a (new) PIE root *menkʷ- ‘to be short, to lack’, reflected in several other branches.
@Roberto Batisti,
Grazie tante. Interesting that the Spanish manco remains in common use
for missing or lacking the use of a hand.
From the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy of the Languages:
Del lat. mancus.
1. adj. Que ha perdido un brazo o una mano, o el uso de cualquiera de estos miembros. U. t. c. s. (lacking an arm or hand, or the use of either)
Sin.:
gafo, maneto, sunco, tuco1, ñeco2, ñoco, coto6, cuto1, mancuncho, zoco3.
2. adj. Dicho de una cosa: Defectuosa, falta de alguna parte necesaria. Obra manca. Verso manco.
Sin.:
defectuoso, incompleto, imperfecto.
3. adj. Mar. desus. Dicho de un bajel: Que no tiene remos.
That recent paper linked by Roberto Batisti goes beyond that etymology, and deeply into the reconstruction of PIE nominal morphology, specifically Barðdal’s work on non-nominative subjects.
While both mayhem and maiming are used or mentioned across two decades of Hattery the supposed connexion between them has never come up. Or does my googling miss something?
Also, did current usage of the spelling connexion ever come up?
“Connexion” is, of course, correct. (I know this because I use that spelling myself. Also “connection.” I contain multitudes.)
The paper that Roberto Batisti linked says “we introduce to the scholarship a previously unidentified verbal root”, but a PIE root *menk- ‘to lack’ was already in the Mallory/Adams book that I quoted above, from 2006, and earlier literature — it’s in Adams’s A Dictionary of Tocharian B (1999), over there in the sidebar. (Wiktionary cites Derksen, Etymological Dictionary of the Baltic Inherited Lexicon (2015), for this root.) I think what the authors are saying is that they’ve really proved now that it was a verb, whereas older work didn’t establish that well enough to qualify for LIV2 back in 2001. Also, they’ve added a Hittite cognate, which allows them to distinguish *menkʷ- from *menk-.
The authors also note that the derivation of Latin mancus from this root requires an additional sound change, so they have to qualify it with “perhaps” and “potential cognate”, while the other five branches are definite. If I understand correctly, the issue is that the expected outcome of an o-grade adjective *monkʷ-o- would be *muncus in Latin rather than mancus, but on the other hand there are precedents for PIE *mo- becoming Latin ma-, in mare and marītus.
(Mencken’s mayhem merits mention also – if it’s not too much to munch-on.)
This is so interesting! In Portuguese, ‘manco’ means lame (as in unable to walk properly).