Clemente Merlo: a master of etymology

Abstract

The cult of objectivity is the distintive mark of Clemente Merlo’s work both from the formal point of view through the systematic application of phonetic laws and from the semantic one thanks to his numeous onomasiologic studies devoted to the lexicon. Among these we have chosen two samples, where the solution sketched by him is fully developed untill the final result. The first one is the case of rugio/rugia ‘mote’, that is traced back to the root *rusk- ‘protruding and prickly vegetable’ according to the sequence *ruskyo > ruscio > rugio with the motivation of a fleck entering into the eye from outside. The second case is represented by the pair appitto vs. spitto, spread through the provinces of Perugia, Arezzo and Siena and refers to the entire piece of money opposed to the change; the exact parallelism with the pair appiccio vs. spiccio, having an indentical meaning, confirms the interpretation of appitto vs. spitto as zero-forms of the past participles of appiccare vs. spiccare.