sartāgō

Meaning

1. post Augustanfrying pan
2. figurativelymixture, medley

Declension

Origins

Of uncertain origin. The Irish priest James Byrne provides one of the only attempts at finding an etymology for this word in his Origin of the Greek, Latin, and Gothic roots, linking the word to serēscō (“to dry off”), due to many forms of heat-based cooking involving evaporating moisture out of food. However, Byrne does not seem to have been a linguist and does not explain the morphological relation, and additionally thought these words were linked by "friction" rather than "dryness", so this etymology is suspect. Another Latin word that Byrne proposes as cognate is sarriō (“to hoe”). The phonetics are a bit closer than serēscō, and semantically, frying pans have a flat surface like the flat blades of hoes as well as the action of flipping food inside a frying pan being vaguely hoe-like. The word seems semantically somewhat similar to Proto-Indo-European *h₂sews- (“to be dry”), though the Indo-European root is otherwise unattested in Italic. Another word it resembles is sartor (“mender, tailor”), which is semantically quite far away. The term could very well be of substrate origin as well. On the other hand, Ernout and Meillet take the word as a derivative of sarciō (“to patch, mend, repair”), with semantic development "patched things" > "mixture, medley" > "tool for mixing (and cooking) food" > "frying pan".

In the Academy Smith's classical dictionaries