Rara #1

Legacy number: 1

 Number  1
 Phenomenon  b-ö-f 'ox'
 Found in  French
 Domain  lexicon — sound-meaning matching
 Type  nonesuch
 Keywords  cattle
 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.
 Violates  none

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Discussion
Notes
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, bËu, vove, voi, goi, ...), Friulian bo, Ladin bouv, Romansch bov, Occitan buÚu/buËu, French b?uf, Catalan bou, Spanish buey, Portuguese boi, ... ? that is, everywhere in the Romance family
Comment
Frans Plank · 21 Sep 2006
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