Etymology

6 Key excerpts on "Etymology"

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  Language Change and Nineteenth-Century Science

  New Words, New Worlds

  • Catherine Watts(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  What’s in a word? Exploring word histories

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003148791-2

  Introduction

  “Etymology is the investigation of word histories” (Durkin, 2013 : 1). It seeks to understand the origins of individual lexical items, uncover the relationships between them and explore how their meanings and form have changed over time to reach their present state (Crystal, 2019 : 146). Such study holds great fascination for many people and has done so since classical times. As Beard notes (2016 : 78): “Greek and Roman intellectuals were fascinated by word derivations, which they were convinced gave the key not just to the origin of the word but also to its essential meaning”.

  Postgraduate study into English language etymologies typically results in research which ranges in length, but which presents aspects of English-language study with a focus, for example, historical, cultural or sociological (Goddard, 2012 : 12). It frequently pulls together a range of scholarly activity from a wide variety of sources into a coherent whole and sometimes adds new knowledge to the topic as well. This first chapter considers various entry points into etymological study to those who are relatively new to such exploration through a range of pertinent considerations such as: useful background knowledge; exploring etymological dictionaries; how new words in the language are created, dated and classified; how to get started with your own research. Etymological study can bring many rewards, offer new insights and broaden linguistic, cultural and historical horizons. It can provide a wealth of incidental pieces of factual information which can turn out to be simply priceless (Malkiel, 1993 : 171) and lead you along fascinating, treasure-lined avenues you might never have thought previously to explore.

  Threads of time

  The Oxford English Dictionary defines Etymology as: “the branch of linguistics which deals with determining the origin of words and the historical development of their form and meanings”. This sense of the word is first documented in the English language in the seventeenth century and derives partly from Old French (ethimologie) and partly from classical Latin (etymologia). The latter shares etymological connections with the, ancient Greek word for ‘true’ (ε′τυμον) and came to mean ‘the root or primary word from which a derivative is formed’ in post-classical grammatical writings. The suffix - logy/-ology entered the English language through French (-logie) and medieval Latin (-logia) from the Greek word -λογία which, in this case, denotes ‘the names of sciences or departments of study’ (see also Chapter 4

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  Ancient and Medieval Greek Etymology

  Theory and Practice I

  • Arnaud Zucker, Claire Le Feuvre(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  truth of words.

  Etymological or etymologizing practices reveal or motivate uses, rites, narratives, and “reflect the (semio-)logical strategies deployed by speakers to organize their lexical knowledge” (Béguelin 2002 , 5). Etymology is “also an organizing instrument. Sometimes it operates on the form and sometimes on the meaning of words, grouping by form words that are associated by meaning, or grouping by their meaning words that are similar in form” (Orr 1954 , 132). This is the reason why the theoretical and practical dimensions of this serious game are closely intertwined, and why both aspects are combined and considered in this book.

  Of course, the relationship it establishes between the words is not always genetically correct even if always culturally relevant, since it is essentially based on intuition—reflective intuition. By favoring the basic principles of phonetics, i.e. sounds (phonemes) and their evolution, modern Etymology validates relationships that are often oblivious to users: for instance, it tells us that the aorist θέσσασθαι “to pray for” and the verb ποθέω “to long for” are related, but no Greek speaker was ever aware of that. This genetic relationship cannot surface as a synchronic relationship in the consciousness of speakers. And ancient Greek Etymology is about synchronic relationships.

  In the Greek conception, all words imply more than they mean or echo. In a game of mirrors each word refers to others it contains, sometimes in a residual way, because each word has been conceived and formed from other pre-existing words that collectively express its meaning. We tend to view the relationship between words in a language too intellectually and in a narrow-minded way, whereas a language is anything but rigid and controlled. Modern lexicography, dependent on the classical age’s academic police, contributes to repressing the linguistic unconscious and to normalizing semantics. The radicalization of the etymological approach, in a kind of formal asceticism, considering semantic proximity illusory and useless for determining the Etymology of a given word, is recent. In the 17th century, semantic proximity was still the main criterion in etymological research. Gilles Ménage was thus able to assert that the word ‘laquais’ (lackey) derived from the Latin verna “slave born in the house”, despite all formal appearances, because of their similar meaning (Baldinger 1954, 233–236). Romanticism reversed the etymological perspective, which gradually based everything on phonetics and abandoned what L. Spitzer (Gamillscheg/Spitzer 1915) called ‘spiritual Etymology’, that is, real and living Etymology. This mutation is, however, more theoretical than real. As Müller’s critical history of Etymology in the 19th century shows, authors continue to juggle with the senses. Thus, Grimm (1819, II.30) derived ‘Name’ from ‘nehmen’, while nomen

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  Peculiar Language

  • Derek Attridge(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  (Sensible Words, xv; the whole introduction is valuable for its discussion of intellectual history). See also 120—21 below.

  Not surprisingly, the rise of the more rigorous enterprise of modern structural linguistics put paid to the scientific pretensions of Etymology—partly, no doubt, because the Saussurean divorce between synchrony and diachrony left no room for even the most attenuated hope that Etymology could illuminate current meanings. Saussure’s own comments on Etymology in the Course, in a brief Appendix to the section on diachronic linguistics (259—60/189—90), are predictably dismissive. Etymology, he asserts, mixes descriptions of sound-change and meaning-change, it draws indiscriminately on phonetics, morphology, semantics, and other branches of linguistics, it lacks a coherent methodology, and it fails to scrutinize its own procedures. Textbooks on language and linguistics now seldom have sections on Etymology, and although a fascination with the origins of words persists, it is more likely to manifest itself in the pages of the Sunday newspaper than in university seminar rooms. The occasional linguist who champions Etymology today has to do so in defensive terms; thus we find Yakov Malkiel writing of Etymology’s “temporarily forfeited controlling position within linguistics” (“Etymology and General Linguistics,” 219) as if it were a King Arthur whose time will come again. And Ernest Weekley is now less well remembered as the author of The Romance of Words than as the Nottingham professor who, in the year in which that volume was first published, introduced his wife Frieda to an ex-student of his named D. H. Lawrence.

  Word-History and Word-Play

  Saussure’s exposure of the fallacy of assimilating current meaning to etymological derivation is antihistorical only insofar as it attacks a simplistic view of history and its relation to present structures of signification. In his distinction between a synchronic and a diachronic approach, Saussure poses two meanings of “history” against each other: history as the complex of social and material forces that modify the individual and the community in a succession of experienced presents, and history as a supraindividual, supracommunal, transtemporal continuum, genetically or teleologically oriented. Jameson, although he portrays Saussure’s distinction as a rejection of history, spells out very clearly the implications for historiography of the two kinds of linguistics, synchronic and diachronic: “The former lies in the immediate lived experience of the native speaker; the latter rests on a kind of intellectual construction, the result of comparisons between one moment of lived time and another by someone who stands outside, who has thus substituted a purely intellectual continuity for a lived one” (Prison-House, 6).20

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  An Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies

  • Michela Canepari(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • EDUCatt Università Cattolica

    (Publisher)

  This last observation does obviously raise the question, very relevant to the study of translation, of the multi-layered aspect of lexical items. A word has in fact an Etymology, a diachronic history which – if the term is not completely lexicalised – will be activated by its use, connotations, collocations, translation equivalents, personal associations, metonymic and metaphoric uses, echoes of homonyms which might or might not be exploited in puns, in written texts associated with images etc. Semantics alone cannot, obviously, account for all this.

  Indeed, although semantics has provided applied linguistics with useful frameworks for systematising meaning and relations among words [8] , and even though the somewhat abstract realm of componential analysis has prompted direct application in vocabulary-teaching materials (Rudzka et al

  ., 1981), as McCarthy states, ‘keeping the study of lexis penned within the world of semantics makes any proposal to develop a lexical model in harmony with a socially embedded view of language difficult’ (1991, 61).

  It was actually in the 1960s that the paradigm of lexical studies began to shift in Western Europe, following the general trend towards a more contextual and social approach to the study of language in general. In 1968 Fillmore elaborated the concept of a ‘case grammar’, which is more functionally oriented but which still does not take into consideration the context in which a text was placed. Even the recent philosophical influence on language study, in particular the Speech Act Theory elaborated on by Austin and Searle, while concentrating on ‘language in use’ still relies on the linguist’s intuition and in actual fact ignored all aspect apart from the utterance and the analyst himself.

  1.5. Discourse Analysis and its Disciplines

  During the last decades, however, the emphasis of language (and translation) studies has changed considerably, and importance began to be given to the analysis of real data, including spoken data. Indeed, one of the main innovations introduced by discourse analysis, which we could identify as the final product of a whole series of developments in the field of language studies, is the attention paid to the analysis of spoken language.

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  Rootedness

  The Ramifications of a Metaphor

  • Christy Wampole(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Martin Heidegger, 47.

  19 For more on the indebtedness of human institutions to the legacies of the dead, see Harrison, Dominion.

  20 Both published in the eighteenth century, two of the most important texts that explore the question of primordial language are Johann Gottfried Herder’s “Essay on the Origin of Language” (1772) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Essay on the Origin of Language” (1781). Two important texts whose objective was to locate the primordial origins of myths are Max Müller’s Essay on Comparative Mythology (1858) and Ernst Cassirer’s Language and Myth (Sprache und Mythos—Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen, 1925).

  21 Alinei, “Thirty-Five Definitions,” 19–20. Alinei does not support this hypothesis, but he considers it “viable” (20).

  22 Genette, Mimologics, 17.

  23 “The eponymy of a person lies in the fact that he bears a significant name; the eponymy of the name lies in its value as a nickname, in the agreement between its designation and its signification, in its indirect motivation. By extension, we will say that eponymy as a ‘science’ (like toponymy) is the study of this type of motivation.” Ibid., 16–17. He expounds,

  Eponymy serves to give a meaning to a name thought to be without one: that is to say, to find in it one or two hidden names, themselves hypothetically meaningful; or, in Proustian terms, to find the names hidden in the words . . . . The point of all this is clear: the problem with eponymical motivation is its infinite facility. It is an easy procedure, with a touch of complacency, of course . . . , but literally interminable. Every word is related to another, and so forth, until the inevitable return to the point of departure (since the lexicon itself is finite). (18)

  24 Attridge, Peculiar Language, 109. Attridge compares Etymology with the calembour

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  Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

  • David Hornsby(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  Language variation, for example, cannot be divorced from social factors such as class or regional origin with which it correlates. Part of speakers’ unconscious knowledge of their mother tongue is clearly of a social nature: English speakers, for example, can make informed judgements about a person’s regional origins or social background on the basis of his/her speech. The relationship between language and society is explored in the subdiscipline of sociolinguistics (see Chapters 11 and 12). Similarly, meaning cannot be properly understood in isolation from context and the knowledge shared by participants in an interaction, which form the subject matter of pragmatics (see Chapter 10). The emergent fields of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and biolinguistics all attest to the interaction of linguistic study with other fields of scientific enquiry, while the branch of linguistics known as stylistics uses theories of language to illuminate the study of literature. Classical and medieval linguistics Greek linguistic scholars were profoundly to influence their Latin successors, whose thinking, as we saw in Chapter 1, exerts a profound influence on prescriptive English grammar even today. The achievement that was to have the greatest impact on Europe and the wider world, however, was the development of a phonemic writing system, i.e. one based on the key sound contrasts used by the language. As early as the second millennium BCE, a syllabic writing system now known to archaeologists as ‘Linear B’ was used by the Myceneans, and in the first millennium BCE the first alphabet in the modern sense of the term was adapted by the Greeks from Phoenician script

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