LINGUIST List 5.1202

Sun 30 Oct 1994

Disc: Folk etymologies

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1. Hartmut Haberland, Re: 5.1197 Some folk etymologies, folk fact; terminological confusions
2. Jouko Lindstedt, Re: 5.1197 Some folk etymologies, folk fact; terminological ,
3. Robert Beard, Re: 5.1197 Some folk etymologies, folk fact; terminological confusions

Message 1: Re: 5.1197 Some folk etymologies, folk fact; terminological confusions

So much for a consensus theory of truth!

Alexis' list could easily be added to; the 'great Eskimo vocabulary hoax' as
exposed by Geoff Pullum is one case in question (that was the widely held
belief that Eskimo has 100 different words for snow). One could add the
connected belief that Greenlandic has an unusual abundance of complex
deictic terms; a rough-and-dirty count for German gives the result that the
figure for German is about the same (just under 100). Another of my
favorites is the etymology of Istanbul from Greek dialectal eis tan polin
(whereas it probably is derived from Konstantinoupolis directly). And the
belief that Malinowski should have coined the term 'phatic communication'
while he actually talked about phatic communion (phatic meaning 'by
speaking') which he contrasted with communication which is something
different.

But so what? Or rather: what's surprising about this? Linguistics is _not_
an exact science and in non-exact sciences (and probably even in exact
sciences) progress doesn't work through the unidirectional amassing of
non-disputable (and hence, non-disputed) knowledge but by dialectic
asymptotic modelling of what we must assume to exist as truth but what we
never will reach - luckily. Put in a different way: one (and this includes
students) can learn more from correcting (or deconstructing) a mistaken
belief than from just assimilating 'the facts'.

Hartmut Haberland
hartmutruc.dk

Message 2: Re: 5.1197 Some folk etymologies, folk fact; terminological ,

 confusions

It seems that the recent posting by amrares.cs.wayne.edu itself
contained an instance of the phenomenon (s)he was referring to: "folk
etymology" does _not_ mean 'a mistaken popular etymology'; it is such a
change in the form of a word that makes the word morphologically
transparent. So (s)he was adding to terminological confusion...

Jouko Lindstedt, U of Helsinki
jouko.lindstedthelsinki.fi

Message 3: Re: 5.1197 Some folk etymologies, folk fact; terminological confusions

 As a member of the US and European communities of Slavists, I can
honestly say that I have never heard anyone suggest that Russian _glaz_ was
borrowed from German. Most Slavists presume that Russians have had both
eyes and reason to refer to them for at least as long as Germans, perhaps
longer. Max Vasmer, a well-known etymologist of the Russian language with
an excellent knowledge of the German anatomy and a figure to whom we all
turn in such matters, associates _glaz_ with _glad-kij_ 'smooth' from an
original meaning of 'marble (or other round, shiny object)' or 'stone'.
However, the etymology seems to have more to do with smoothness and
shininess than stones.