Today’s word of the day, courtesy of Word of the Day app, is frore, an adjective meaning “frosty, frozen.” According to www.etymonline.com, the word is “archaic (but found in poetry as late as Keats),” and it appears in this form first around the year 1200. It comes “from Old English froren, past participle of freosan.” Etymonline.com adds that froren “would be the title of the Anglo-Saxon version of Disney’s movie.”

Under freeze, etymonline.com goes further: “from Proto-Germanic *freusan ‘to freeze’ (source also of Dutch vriezen, Old Norse frjosa, Old High German friosan, German frieren ‘to freeze,’ and related to Gothic frius ‘frost’), from Proto-Germanic *freus-, equivalent to PIE root *preus- ‘to freeze,’ also ‘to burn’ (source also of Sanskrit prusva, Latin pruina ‘hoarfrost,’ Welsh rhew ‘frost,’ Sanskrit prustah ‘burnt,’ Albanian prus ‘burning coals,’ Latin pruna ‘a live coal’).” It looks paradoxical that the PIE word means both “to freeze” and “to burn,” but if you have ever been out in freezing temperatures for too long, you know how frozen fingers can feel like they are burning. And if you haven’t read one of these blogs before, I’ll just add that the asterisk before a word or word form indicates that it is a reconstructed form, that there is no extant example of the word.

The shift from the /z/ sound to the /r/ sound is a fairly regular linguistic change called rhotacism or rhotacization. This is a process by which a different consonant sound, like /z/, becomes /r/. It usually happens when a following syllable is altered or added. For example, the past tense of the verb to be is wæs in the singular but wæron in the plural, hence contemporary English was and were. Another example would be lose and forlorn (OE: leosan and forloren).

On this date in 1512, the Spanish crown approved the Laws of Burgos (Leyes de Burgos), the first rules regarding the treatment of native populations in the New World. The background is that Domingo de Mendoza of Seville, a Cardinal and an Archbishop, heard about the abuse of the native people of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti), so he sent some friars to the island to preach against such abuse. The preaching did not really help, but the colonists got worried that the Crown would impinge on their ability to do what they wanted to do, so they sent a representative back to Spain. The effort failed, leading to these laws.

According to Francisco Macías, these laws were not really the first laws promulgated by the Spanish, but they were printed out and sent to Hispaniola, which was kind of a first. Macías says, “It is believed that the creation of these laws is the legacy of Fray Antonio de Montesinos, who delivered his first sermon on December 21, 1511 (aka “the Christmas sermon”) advocating justice for the native peoples. Among those present at his first sermon was Bartolomé de las Casas, known for having been a staunch defender of the rights of indigenous peoples” (https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2012/12/the-laws-of-burgos-500-years-of-human-rights/).

The laws called for the establishment of encomiendas, which were like communities of laborers working under an encomendero—it was a very medieval kind of system. But the laborers were to be paid, and there was some very minimal protection; for instance, women more than four months pregnant were excused from hard labor. Housing was to be constructed, and a church was to be built within a certain distance of every encomienda. The goal was to take advantage of the labor of the indigenous people but also to convert them to Christianity. The laws also established 40 days of rest for the workers and outlawed polygamy and divorce. Furthermore, Spanish men who took advantage of indigenous women were required to marry them.

Some of the labor laws that we associate with the Industrial Revolution, particularly in relation to child labor, are present in the Laws of Burgos and the amendments that followed upon them. For instance, children were not allowed to do hard labor until they were 14, which is much better than the Cotton Factory Law of 1819 in England.

But some of the origins of the Laws of Burgos are clearly racist in nature. Macías writes,

The second paragraph offers a view of the Spanish Crown’s understanding of the natives who were, borrowing Bakewell’s translation, “by nature . . . inclined to idleness and vice, and have no manner of virtue or doctrine.”  The sustained tone throughout this paragraph is one that seems to stem from a conviction that in order to help the natives it would be necessary to bring them closer to the colonizers.  In fact, “because of the distance and their own evil inclinations, they immediately forget what they have been taught and go back to their customary idleness and vice, and when they come to serve again they are as new in the doctrine as they were at the beginning.”

We cannot condone such racist attitudes. In fact, what the document says about the indigenous people of Hispaniola is at least as applicable to the Spaniards who refused to listen to the preachers who had been sent to them by the Church of which they were all, supposedly, members.

In this we see both the good side and the bad side of the Christian church. On the one hand, the Church supported the Crown in many ways, and the Crown looked to benefit from the exploitation of the indigenous people of Hispaniola. On the other hand, it was also the Church that preached against that same exploitation, and that preaching led to the Laws of Burgos and other, later laws to minimize that exploitation.

We shouldn’t be surprised at this seeming paradox. After all, the Church is made up of people, and the hearts of some of those people are good, and the hearts of others are frore.

Today’s image is of a building on the lake in Buffalo, NY, which experienced the worst snow storm in decades. The photo is included in an article on the People magazine website; it was taken by Fatih Aktas (https://people.com/human-interest/winter-storm-death-toll-rises-buffalo-new-york-so-many-bodies/). The building is, like the hearts of some, frore.