All Slavic: origins of *gъrbatъ

[TheRoman]

Hi there,

I was checking out the Wikipedia entry for Berenguer Ramon I, Count of Barcelona, also known as the Crooked or the Hunchback (in Latin curvus; in Catalan el Corbat; in Spanish el Corvado or el Curvo). In Russian he would be Горбатый. According to Wiktionary the word горбатый derives from Proto-Slavic *gъrbatъ.

Looking at all of the above, it seems fairly reasonable to suppose that горбатый/*gъrbatъ is related to corbat/corvado, and descending from Latin curvus. My googling hasn't returned any pages mentioning this connection so I wanted to run this by you fine folks. Is there a connection or am I just imagining one?

 

[Awwal12]

and descending from Latin curvus

How can a native Slavic word descend from Latin curvus?..
They cannot go back to the common PIE formation either for obvious phonetic reasons (Italic *k- and Balto-Slavic *g- cannot go back to a common phoneme; Proto-Italic *-wos corresponds to Slavic -*vъ rather than -**bъ, cf. novъ vs. novus, mьrtvъ vs. mortuus.

 

[Panceltic]

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