Rafael Lanzetti's Tidbits of Philology no. 001

Hello everyone, welcome to the first “Lanzetti’s Tidbits of Philology”. In this series, I’ll present you tiny bits of previous research, class material and examples for papers/lectures I’ve prepared throughout the years I’ve been working as a University Linguistics teacher. These will be brief and direct, but you can ask me for more detailed info if you wish. I’ll always give examples in the languages I know or learn, and I’d be grateful if you could add the corresponding translation in your own language.

Today’s topic is the idiom “to know by heart” - 

The English expression itself comes from Latin “ex corde” (cf. SPQR) through French, probably adopted in England in the 12th century C.E. together with about 12,000 other lexemes.

Then we have two main philological groups: 

Group 1: Languages that continue using the Latin reference to the heart, especially the “romantic” Romance languages

Portuguese “de cor”

French “par cœur”

Subgroup 1.1: Languages that refer to other parts of the body

Dutch “uit het hoofd” (from the head)

Hebrew: “בעל פה” (from the mouth, orally)
Bulgarian: наизуст (from the mouth)

Subgroup 1.2: Languages that refer to the abstract concept of “memory”

Spanish: “de memoria”

Italian: “a memoria”

Group 2: Languages that refer to the location/motion “out”. The probable etymological explanation here is that one knows the piece of information s/he wants to give without needing any extra help from a book, s/he can “expel it”, “warble it out” from the inside of his/her head outwards to the real world. According to the Duden Dictionary, the idiom was created around the 13th century and its meaning was already widespread around the 16th century in Germany. Many of the main Germanic languages use this reference, although some of them have switched the origin-destination relation, but that is a very common philological phenomenon.

German: “auswendig” (moving outwards)

Dutch: “van buiten” (from the outside)

Swedish: “utantill” (outwards)

Icelandic: “utan að” (outwards)

Romanian: “pe dinafară” (on the outside)

Greek: “απ’έξω” (from the outside)

I’d be interested in knowing to which of the groups your language belongs!