nonesuch 1: b-ö-f ‘ox’
- Where found
- French
- Domain
- lexicon
- Subdomain
- sound-meaning matching
- Keywords
- cattle
- Type
- nonesuch
- Universals violated
- none
- Source
- Saussure, Ferdinand de (1985). Cours de linguistique générale. Publié par Charles Bally et Albert Sé chehaye, avec la collaboration de Albert Riedlinger. Édition critique pré paré e par Tullio de Mauro. Postface de Louis-Jean Calvet.
And equally nonesuch are billions of other sound-meaning matchings defining lexemes and also grammemes (though not all).
But then, aren’t such matchings typically family possessions, hence infrequentalia rather than rara/rarissima/singularia, of course allowing for some more or less regular formal and/or semantic intrafamily variation?
cf. Latin bov(-em),
whence Romanian bou,
Sardinian boe/boi, Italian bove (regional bo, bèu, vove, voi, goi, …),
Friulian bo, Ladin bouv, Romansch bov,
Occitan buòu/buèu, French bœuf,
Catalan bou, Spanish buey, Portuguese boi, …
– that is, everywhere in the Romance family