Stevedore
Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2006 5:31 am
STEVEDORE
NOUN: One who is employed in the loading or unloading of ships.
TRANSITIVE & INTRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: ste·ve·dored, ste·ve·dor·ing, ste·ve·dores
To load or unload the cargo of (a ship) or to engage in the process of loading or unloading such a vessel.
ETYMOLOGY: Spanish estibador, from estibar, to stow, from Latin stipare, to pack.
According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000
Just amazed how the third consonant has migrated from /p/ to /b/ and then to /v/.
NOUN: One who is employed in the loading or unloading of ships.
TRANSITIVE & INTRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: ste·ve·dored, ste·ve·dor·ing, ste·ve·dores
To load or unload the cargo of (a ship) or to engage in the process of loading or unloading such a vessel.
ETYMOLOGY: Spanish estibador, from estibar, to stow, from Latin stipare, to pack.
According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000
Just amazed how the third consonant has migrated from /p/ to /b/ and then to /v/.
. As a matter of fact, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan seem to have a predilection for voiced consonants, whereas Italian and French normally keep them voiceless: c (k) - g, t - d, p - b. How it went from estibador to stevedore is probably due to the fact that Spanish intervocalic b sounds somewhere between a b and a v, and to an English speaker that could have sounded like a v at that particular time. I'd also like to point out that in Portuguese we have estivador, so something else could be at play too. Anyway, b in Spanish and v in Portuguese is a very common phenomenon: deber/dever (to owe/must), haber/haver (to have), etc. Here Spanish has kept the b that was already found in Latin (debere, habere), and we have a v because we pronounce it a v!