Hello! I was wondering if you could help me with an etymology/history related question, maybe how to look for info about it. The Spanish word for distaff is "rueca". When looking at the etymology for it, it brings out the obvious from Germanic root *rŏkko, which in itself is related to rock. Thing is... a distaff is basically a wooden stick. It can be literally just a more or less straight branch of a tree, so to me it doesn't make much sense that it's etymologically related to rocks or stones in any way. It would make more sense for a spindle (huso, in Spanish) to have an etymology related to rocks, as the whorl could be made with small stones, and while it is true that often distaff and spindle are mistaken for one another in vulgar speech (at least in Spanish), it still feels weird to me because a spindle is also mainly a stick, and the whorl can also be made with ceramic or wood. Long story short... do you know how I could find out research about this etymology and how they came to this conclusion other than by looking at the word? (if they researched this further than by looking at the word) Do you have any thoughts or theories to share about this?
Hmm, I don't have much specific advice here, although a Google scholar search for rueca and etymology (or etimología) may get you some specific information
More generally though, this sort of semantic change is pretty common (e.g. the English word "needle" comes from a root meaning "to spin" and so presumably originally referred to either a spindle or distaff)
That said, the word here isn't obviously Germanic. It seems to be somewhat of a common substrate word of Western Europe, seen in Medieval Latin as rocca (which is exactly the shape of word we'd expect the Spanish to descend from) alongside West Germanic *rokk (which I'd have expected to probably be borrowed as masculine *rueco, and note also that the word is not found in North or East Germanic afaict), and Breton roc'h (which if a borrowing would have to be a very early one given the provection, which would require the source to still have a geminate)
Apparently there is some suggestion it may ultimately be from Gaulish, but I'm unable to find further specifics there at the moment (I'd want to take a look in de Vaan's Latin etymological dictionary and, for all its faults, Matasovic's Celtic etymological dictionary, but I'm away from my desktop and books right now)
@motsimages
Now that I'm back with books, I realise now that I slightly went down the wrong branch of this question, looking into the etymology of English rock, rather than of Spanish rueca (and the extent to which a Germanic etymology is plausible).
It is strictly possible that the West Germanic Suebi (the only West Germanic group to ever have a significant presence in Iberia prior to the British capture of Gibraltar in the modern era), in migrating through Spain brought the term *rokk- for some sort of stone involved in textile production with them, which then developed into Spanish rueca, but I think there are too many complications in that story to make it especially plausible to me, even if the RAE do endorse it.
The semantic shift from rock > needle involves multiple non-trivial, albeit certainly possible, jumps.
The fact the word isn't found in the core Suebi territory of Galicia and Northern Portugal
That it would be odd to borrow a word for an existing technology from an incoming superstrate
That it seems unlikely to me that they wouldn't recognise the similarity between Suebian *rokk and their *rocca even if the quality of the *o were different (given the identical semantics), and so instead it would seem more likely that this would be an additional sense acquired by rocca > roca rather than a new word rɔcca > ruega.
For this sort of word for a tool involved in basic textile production, I'd probably expect early substrates to be more significant than later superstrates, so for a source of ruega, I'd expect a Palaeo-Hispanic source to be more plausible than a Germanic one. Unfortunately most Palaeo-Hispanic languages are essentially undeciphered, so the only likely way to verify this would be if it happens to be sourced from a Vasconic variety, in which case there may be similar words in (dialectal) Basque terminology for objects used in basic textile production.
Going back to the tangent of the word rock itself though, unfortunately neither de Vaan or Matasovic include this word, and neither does Kroonen's Proto-Germanic etymological dictionary.
I will note however, that Proto-West-Germanic *rokk would require (if inherited) Proto-Germanic *rukka- (the only native sources of short *o in West Germanic being from *u via a-mutation), which would bring it further from the Medieval Latin form, suggesting that there relationship is probably a relatively late borrowing which took place after *o had already developed as a phoneme in West Germanic (and, given the presence in Breton prior to provection, the direction of the loan was most likely into West Germanic from a Romance substrate).
Etymonline cites "Diez" (it is unclear what work this refers to) as suggesting a derivation from a Vulgar Latin *rupica from rupes "rocks". This would seem quite plausible if, like the author of etymonline, you routinely ignore diacritics, but unfortunately Latin rupes is actually rūpēs with two long vowels, so the suggested etymon would be *rūpica, which would give a Proto-West-Romance form *rucca, not the *rocca (with high-mid *o, either from Latin ŭ or ō if inherited) we see in most of the Romance reflexes, or the **rɔcca (with low-mid *ɔ, from Latin ŏ) we'd require for rueca (if not a later borrowing). I suppose we could in principle have this borrowed at an early stage into Proto-Germanic before a-umlaut ceased to be productive, and then back at a later stage, but that's way too complicated to be especially plausible
I do think the Breton word is somewhat suggestive of a Celtic origin (or at least an early presence within Celtic), but I don't see any plausible PIE source, so it would still likely be from a Palaeo-European substrate (albeit via Celtic and, in the case of Germanic, possibly also Latin).
