Feijoo

merquiades

merquiades

Senior Member
Lorraine, France
English (USA Northeast)
Hello. Would anyone know the etymology of this surname? It is the name of a Galician politician in Spain. Though I am tempted to believe it is Galician, this language does not have the letter j or the sound /x/ in it. "oo" is also kind of weird for any Romance language. It is not Castilian as this language lacks initial f-.
 
    • Feijoo (apellido) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

    merquiades said:
    It is not Castilian as this language lacks initial f-.
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    :confused: Did you mean Basque? (Even though there a few Basque words with initial f like fereka).

    merquiades said:
    "oo" is also kind of weird for any Romance language.
    Click to expand...
    In Spanish, it can be found in some words borrowed from Greek like noosfera or the ones containing the prefix zoo- or the suffix -zoo. It can be found too in words starting by o prefixed with the prefix co-. Also in some verb conjugations like loo, incoo...
    It can also be found in toponyms like Boo or Campoo.
     
    Lots of theories.
    Fac solus. Do alone. That's a really nice name and seems convincing.

    In Castilian it would have probably become *hejolo or *hazsolo/hasolo/hazuelo or something more like that.
     
    AndrasBP said:
    "Feijóo or Feijão is a Spanish, Galician and Portuguese surname. It is also considered a Sephardic Jewish surname."

    (Wikipedia)
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    Feijão kidney bean. That would be a weird surname.
    I had been wondering if it could have been Sephardic Jewish, but Fac Solus, do alone, is more convincing to me than bean.

    Fac solus > Faixoo > Feixou (easy evolution pronounced "Fay show".)
    Feijoo has to be partly Castilianized late in time for it to have become j /x/.
     
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    Honestly, that Fac Solus looks like the less probable of all those theories.

    I rather concur with what the Asociación Galega de Onomástica says here. It probably comes from an old association of a feijoo/feixoo 'bean' with baldness. Bald in its standard form, Calvo, is commonly used as a surname. Surnames tend to come from names referring to places, jobs or ways of calling people by some features rather than from Latin sentences.

    The use of j, particularly in the pronunciation of it as /x/, is Castilian interference from the 19th century, as the link also says. The former Spanish president already had a Castilianized Galician surname, Rajoy (for Raxoi).
     
    Exactly what Penyafort wrote.

    Feijoo is a Castilianized form of an older Middle Galician Feixoo, which was anyway written Feijoo in Medieval Galician, when we had a /ʃ/ versus /ʒ/ contrast. Today is most frequent in central-southern Galicia (FEIJO* - Cartografía dos apelidos de Galicia).

    It derives directly from Vulgar Latin Phaseolu 'Little bean' > *Feijolo ( -sy- > -ys- > -yj-; -ay- > -ey- ) > Feijoo (with characteristic Galicia-Portuguese lose of intervocalic /l/, compare Pt. feijão) > Feixoo (/ʒ/ > /ʃ/). The double oo at the end is archaic spelling, relativelly frequent in surnames; it also codified an open o: Galician pronunciation is [fejˈʃɔ]. It was finally Castilianized Feijoo (<x> > <j> [x]; and [o]).

    The word is used by Afonso X of Castile, apparently referring to the bald head of a guy: "semelha Pedro Gil no feijoo" ~ "looks as Pedro Gil in the bald".

    As a nickname or surname I find it in 1433, but I'm sure it was used earlier: "Juan Fariña, pedreiro, se obligou de dar a Fernan Garçia de Astorga, ou a quen seu poder ouver, de un moyo de sal de dosentos et des et seys mrs. blanca en tres dineiros de un moyo de sal que ovo, o qual levou Juan Feijoo, mareante, por el et en seu nome, pagar a pascoa de resureiçon primeira, so pena do doblo·" (Minutario Notarial de Pontevedra, 1433)


    And... the guy won a majority in the last Galician elections with the unheard lemma "Galicia, Galicia, Galicia".
     
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    merquiades said:
    Lots of theories.
    Fac solus. Do alone. That's a really nice name and seems convincing.

    In Castilian it would have probably become *hejolo or *hazsolo/hasolo/hazuelo or something more like that.
    Click to expand...
    Actually, in Medieval Galician this would have given *"Fay soo"; with a feasible evolution /aj/ > /ej/ (trivial in Galicia) and, through sandhi, /js/ > /jʃ/, also trivial, it could have became Feyjoo. There are semantically similar Galician surnames, as Fiúza 'Confidence' (< Latin fīdūcia). But the other proposal is more economical, I think.
     
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