# Sopeo = to whisper?



## robbie_SWE

Hi! 

I've stumbled upon this word in a forum, but I can't seem to find it anywhere in Latin-English dictionaries.
 
Apparently *sopeo* means "I whisper". 
 
Can anybody help me? 
 
Thanks in advance!

 robbie


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## franz rod

Are you sure?   May it be sopio?   Sopio means "to send to sleep" but also "to calm down", "to appease".


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## robbie_SWE

franz rod said:


> Are you sure? May it be sopio? Sopio means "to send to sleep" but also "to calm down", "to appease".


 
Ahaa...the person who wrote it spelled it like I did, but he could have been wrong. 

The discussion was about the etymology of the Romanian word "*a şopti*" (to whisper). The person refered to it as being derived from the Latin _sopeo_, but I'm not sure that he was right about that. 

Nevertheless, thank you Franz Rod!

 robbie


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## franz rod

Maybe "sopti" could came from a Slavic word.  
Šapat in Croatian and šepat in Slovenian means "to whisper".


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## robbie_SWE

franz rod said:


> Maybe "sopti" could came from a slavic word.
> šapat in Croatian and šepat in Slovenia means "to whisper".


 
I know, but the morphology doesn't seem to make sense. The morphology from *a* or *e *to "o" hasn't been proved to have happened in Romanian. 

 robbie


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## Kevin Beach

The only word for "to whisper" given by Cassell's Latin dictionary is *susurrare* (noun = *susurrus*). It sounds onomatopoeic to me.


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## Hamlet2508

Kevin Beach said:


> The only word for "to whisper" given by Cassell's Latin dictionary is *susurrare* (noun = *susurrus*). It sounds onomatopoeic to me.


Same over here.
Iif you wanted to go overboard, you might use *insusurrare (*_alicui aliquid ad aures/in aures).

_Regards,
Hamlet


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## Twinmeister

"a şopti" in Romanian is a cognate with Slavonic "šĩpŭtati", Bulgarian "şeptja" and Serbocroation "šaputali" (hence the Serbian and Croatian forms mentioned earlier).

As far as it goes, these words are alleged to derive from the PIE root *sleb- meaning "to be weak, to sleep", the equally alleged origin of English sleep, etc., while *swer- is the alleged origin of Sanskritt "svarati", Latin "surdus", "susurrus", Northumbrian Old English "hwisprian" (Modern English "to whisper").


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## jazyk

And there's Czech šeptat, Slovak šeptať, Polish szeptać and Russian шептать.


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## Tolovaj_Mataj

franz rod said:


> ... and šepat   in Slovenian means "to whisper".


 
In Slovene it's "šepetati" /to whisper/.

Curious: in Slovene "sopsti" (sopem, sopeš, sope,...)  means to breathe hard, to gasp


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