¹ In the Partures Adam (Les jeux partis d'Adam de la Halle) ed. Nicod. 4, a whole jeu parti is built upon the two kinds of love: courtly love is represented by li autres sans dausnoy, physical love by l'uns en ribaut (of which a nominal derivative is riboi).— Esnault, Métaphores occidentales 221 attests the phrase membre ribaut in 1606.

² In fact the ribaldi, ribautz were soldiers who were supposed to open a battle by attacking boldly (cf. Du Cange), and the ribaudequin or ribaudel was a kind of cannon defined by Froissard ‘brouettes haultes bendees de fer a longs picos de fer devant en la pointe’ and by Cl. Fauchet ‘des instruments appeliez ribaudequins . . . a la façon des anciens scorpions, pource qu'ils picquoient plus mortellement que les bestes venimeuses’ (Godefroy s.vv.)— these words conform the evolution to ‘to push forward, attack, strike’. A fem. noun ribaine is once attested in the 16th cent. (Godefroy) with the meaning ‘quarrel’ (> *‘riot, fight, beating‘).

³ For variations in nursery rhymes, cf. Frieda Kocher, Reduplikationsbildungen im Franz. u. Ital. pass. (Aarau 1921).

⁴ One could perhaps better explain Lorraine hhemele (chemele) ‘semelle’, hhemeler (chemeler) ‘ressemeler’ by an *ex-semell-are, cf. essuyer (< *ex-sucare) > hhouwer (chouwer), Zéligzon. hhémè ‘entame, trou commencé, par ex. dans un tas de foin’ (ibid.) belongs probably to the family of semus ‘diminished’, not to the other hhème ‘escabeau, marchepied’ = scabellum + scamnum (REW §7633; Germ. schemel). The same is true of hhemèle ‘partie inférieure d'un pressoir’, cf. semelle ‘id.’ in Neuchâtel (Pierrehumbert). Lorraine sêmer ‘se dit d'un tonneau qui perd’ (Adam) < semare (OFr. semer in Quatre fliz Haimon = ‘maigrir’). The Fr. se chêmer ‘dépérir’ (attested since 1564) is probably not an Italianism as the etymological dictionaries from Meyer-Lübke to Dauzat assert, but a dialectal French (Lorraine) form = *ex-semare, parallel to the *ex-semellare mentioned above.

⁵ The original sense of semus ‘half’ is preserved in Romance by the Kassel glosses (sim—halp), by Span. jeme originally ‘½ foot’ (measure of length), then ‘the distance from thumb to index finger’ (tiene buen jeme ‘palmito’, astur. xeme ‘la medida de un palmo’). The sole as a measure of distance survives, according to Esnault, Métaphores occidentales 32, in several parts of France: cf. Neuchâtel jouer à semelle ‘jeu de garçons qui consiste à sauter par-dessus le dos d'un camarade; en retombant le plus loin possible on crie Semelle! et l'on measure la distance avec le pied’ (Pierrehumbert).

It is not impossible that the Fr. seime ‘cleft in a hoof’ had originally the meaning ‘sole’ and goes back to sema (solea): *semella would then be a derivative of the latter. The Fr. mule ‘pantoufle’ (= Lat. mulleus) has developed quite similarly to what I have assumed in the case of seime: it came to mean ‘malander’ (and cf. avoir mule au talon ‘to be frostbitten‘).

⁶ Cf. the German expression halbe Sohlen ‘taccagno, bout de soulier’ (listed in a dictionary of 1719, quoted by DWb. s.v. sohle le).

⁷ The plautus contained in semiplotia has survived in Romance: Ital. piota ‘sole’, REW s.v.