> Secundinus cacator, which translates into (ahem) “Secundinus, the shitter."
In Brazil we have the expression "cagão" which can translated as "big shitter" to refer to someone who encourages or announces a firm, dangerous or exemplar behavior but recedes back when need to assume it arrives.
I don't know if it is the same word but it reminds me of a joke a Brazilian friend told me when we were discussing how it can be hard to translate jokes. He mentioned that someone who shits a lot is a common insult in Brazil.
The joke goes: A young man visits the family of his girlfriend for the first time. At one point the father of the girl pulls him aside and tells him that he is no good for his daughter. The father wants a rich man for his daughter. He tells the young man "you can't buy my daughter a nice house, you can't buy her a nice car, you can't buy her nice clothes, I bet you can't even afford to buy her toilet paper". Later, as the young man and girl drive home she notices he is upset. She asks if her dad maybe said something to him. He said, yes, he told me you are a big shitter.
So my knowledge of Spanish is pretty limited but being in South Texas I do run into it, and I've always thought the word "caca" was more analogous to "poop" rather than "shit"; ie they mean they same thing but one is more offensive. I never know how close Portugese is to Spanish though; it's a language I have next to no exposure to.
Interestingly, in American English, we would refer to someone who lies a lot as a "bullshitter" or "full of shit", but someone who is cowardly is a "chickenshit". It sounds like "cagão" is a bit of a combination. Either way it seems like one of those universal human cultural tendencies.
In the real world, it is common to see cultural and intellectual discussion degrade to shit talking. In Hacker News, talking about shit evolves to a cultural and intellectual discussion. I love this!
Lots of baby words are shared amongst languages even if they're not related. The most obvious one I see are the variations of baba, papa, dada, etc for dad.
My iraqi friends say baba and arabic is certainly not originated from latin.
There are certainly some Latin loan words in Arabic; that part of the world was well within the Roman sphere of influence for a long time. For instance: the Arabic ṣirāṭ and English street both come from the Latin word strata.
No, but several of the earlier languages in Anatolia did have Into-European roots as did some of the surrounding languages, such as Persian. It could easily be a loan word.
*kakka-
also kaka-, Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to defecate." According to Watkins, "imitative of glottal closure during defecation."
In Brazil we have the expression "cagão" which can translated as "big shitter" to refer to someone who encourages or announces a firm, dangerous or exemplar behavior but recedes back when need to assume it arrives.