See this wikipedia article for the name and the hmm. There was even a dedicated Goddess for these pruning tasks, whose name was Puta. Plenty of advice for wine growers and usages of putare for lexicographers). On this particular subject you can refer to Columella - Res Rustica Book IV - passim. In order to prevent these diseases, you need to prune your vines so as to keep them well ventilated and remove the dead growth where fungi thrive. In the Roman world, trimming and pruning is of particular importance for grapevines which are very sensitive to such diseases as mildew and mould caused by various fungi. This meaning of 'trimming'/'pruning' is still present in present day Italian ( potare gli alberi, potare i vitigni) and in derived words such as amputation. Purify => as in ' to clean' or ' to cleanse' There is a reduplicative phrase in ancient Roman to emphasize purity for silver: But for now we need to work on puto.Īpplies to precious metals such as gold and silver. putare is an ancient form later Latin uses purifico ( purus-facio) and purgo. The semantic path here could in my opinion be close to the following one: Step 0. More recently distinguished latinists such as Ernout and Meillet could not rule out the possibility of two distinct homophonic roots (] - puto).Īs for me, I don't have a definitive answer to this one but here are a few dots you might want to connect. For them, the relation was clear - although they did not necessarily agree with each other. The Romans themselves had various explanations to offer.

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Privatus latin meaning