sartago

Latin

Etymology

Of uncertain origin.

The Irish priest James Byrne provides one of the only attempts at finding an etymology for this word in his Origin of the Greek, Latin, and Gothic roots, linking the word to serēscō (“to dry off”), due to many forms of heat-based cooking involving evaporating moisture out of food. However, Byrne does not seem to have been a linguist and does not explain the morphological relation, and additionally thought these words were linked by "friction" rather than "dryness", so this etymology is suspect.

Another Latin word that Byrne proposes as cognate is sarriō (“to hoe”). The phonetics are a bit closer than serēscō, and semantically, frying pans have a flat surface like the flat blades of hoes as well as the action of flipping food inside a frying pan being vaguely hoe-like.

The word seems semantically somewhat similar to Proto-Indo-European *h₂sews- (“to be dry”), though the Indo-European root is otherwise unattested in Italic. Another word it resembles is sartor (“mender, tailor”), which is semantically quite far away.

The term could very well be of substrate origin as well.

On the other hand, Ernout and Meillet take the word as a derivative of sarciō (“to patch, mend, repair”), with semantic development "patched things" > "mixture, medley" > "tool for mixing (and cooking) food" > "frying pan".

Pronunciation

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): /sarˈtaː.ɡoː/, [s̠ärˈt̪äːɡoː]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /sarˈta.ɡo/, [särˈt̪äːɡo]

Noun

sartāgō f (genitive sartāginis); third declension

1. (Late Latin) frying pan

   Synonyms: frīxōrium, frīctōrium, fretāle

2. (figuratively) mixture, medley

Declension

Third-declension noun.

	singular	plural
nominative	sartāgō	sartāginēs
genitive	sartāginis	sartāginum
dative	sartāginī	sartāginibus
accusative	sartāginem	sartāginēs
ablative	sartāgine	sartāginibus
vocative	sartāgō	sartāginēs

Descendants

• Italo-Romance:
  • Neapolitan: sartàjine
  • Romanesco: sartàina, sardània
  • Sicilian: sartànija
• Southern Gallo-Romance:
  • Aragonese: sartana
  • Occitan:

    Gascon: sartan, sartanha, sartana, sartena, sàrtia

    Languedocien: sartan

    Provençal: sartan

    Vivaro-Alpine: sartan

• Ibero-Romance:
  • Galician: sartaña
  • Portuguese: sertã
  • Spanish: sartén
• Insular Romance:
  • Sardinian:

    Campidanese: sartania, sattaina

    Logudorese: sartaina

    Nuorese: sartaghine, sartaine, sartaghina

Further reading

• “sartago”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “sartago”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• "sartago", in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
• sartago in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
• “sartago”, in Harry Thurston Peck, editor (1898), Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, New York: Harper & Brothers
• “sartago”, in William Smith et al., editor (1890), A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, London: William Wayte. G. E. Marindin
• Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1911) “sartāgo”, in Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (in German), page 573