catanum

Latin

Alternative forms

***catanus (possible earlier masculine or feminine)

Etymology

Unclear, due to its not being mentioned by Imperial Era botanical or agricultural authors and being continued in only comparatively early Romanized Gallia Narbonensis and Hispania citerior theorized to have died out elsewhere by the end of the 1st century BCE but brought there in the century before that by Sabine settlers and having been derived from Sabine catus, which is the semantic equivalent of Latin acūtus and thus as an etymological equivalent of catus preserves its literal meaning “spiky”, with the suffix as in the tree-names carpinus and fraxinus, which is formally possible as Sabine had not weakened the penultimate vowel in proparoxytones of this kind. Note the name of the related species herba Sabīna (“savin”, literally “Sabine herb”), arbor Sabīna (“savin”, literally “Sabine tree”), and even the genus name jūniperus is formally marked as Sabine. Otherwise a Punic borrowing, of the same Semitic origin as κέδρος (kédros), thus a doublet of cedrus from Greek and of Medieval Latin catrānum (“bundle of brushweed dunked into tar”) from Arabic. To Proto-Finnic *kataga (“juniper”) respectively Latvian kadiķis, Lithuanian kadagys, Old Prussian kadegis (“juniper”) there is no way in either direction.

Pronunciation

(Classical Latin) IPA^(key): /ˈka.ta.num/, [ˈkät̪änʊ̃ˑ]
(modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /ˈka.ta.num/, [ˈkäːt̪änum]

Noun

catanum n (genitive catanī); second declension (hapax)

western prickly juniper, cade (Juniperus oxycedrus)
- 690–750, Excerpta ex libro glossarum published in the Corpus glossariorum latinorum V page 179, 6
  Citisum genus arboris quasi catanum erba odoribera uergilius et uix humiles apibus casias rorem que
  Cytisus is a kind of tree like juniper a sweet-smelling herb, greener and hardly serving the bees in comparison to golden showers and rosemary.

Declension

Second-declension noun (neuter).

	singular	plural
nominative	catanum	catana
genitive	catanī	catanōrum
dative	catanō	catanīs
accusative	catanum	catana
ablative	catanō	catanīs
vocative	catanum	catana

Descendants

Old Occitan: cade
- Occitan: cade, cadre, cai, chiade, chiaina, chai
-  → Middle French: cade
  - French: cade, cadier
  - → English: cade
Old Catalan: *cade
- Catalan: càdec
- → Spanish: cada (rare)

References

Behrens, Dietrich (1910) Beiträge zur französischen Wortgeschichte und Grammatik. Studien und Kritiken‎^[1] (in German), Halle: Max Niemeyer, pages 37–38
Brüch, Josef (1922) “Lateinische Etymologien”, in Indogermanische Forschungen. Zeitschrift für Indogermanistik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft‎^[2] (in German), volume 40, Berlin und Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., pages 197–213