ETYMOLOGY ETYMOLOGY YAKOV MALKIEL Emeritus Professor, Department of Linguistics and Romance Philology Program, University of California, Berkeley CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521311663 © Cambridge University Press 1993 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1993 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Malkiel, Yakov, 1914- Etymology / Yakov Malkiel p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 32338 x (hardback). ISBN 0 521 31166 7 (paperback) 1. Language and languages — Etymology — History. I. Title P321.M341993 412 - dc2092-20773 92-20773 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-32338-3 Hardback ISBN 978-0-521-31166-3 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel timetables, and other factual information given in this work is correct at the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter. CONTENTS Preface ix 1 The nineteenth century 1 2 The first half of the twentieth century 41 3 The second half of the twentieth century 105 Conclusion 167 References 173 Indexes 209 vn PREFACE The choice of an accurate and, at the same time, appealing title for this book has, I confess, cost me considerable headaches. The point is that etymology (unless one is willing to equate it with some such indifferent rendering as "the discipline of word origins'), has tended to mean, in its actual applications and, above all, implications, entirely different things to successive generations of scholars and laymen alike, from Antiquity to the concluding years of the twentieth century. In certain remote periods, the literal meaning of a given proper name and the messages encoded into it (especially but not exclusively in reference to proper names of persons) meant incomparably more to an average member of the speech community in question than the provenance of any common nouns. After all, parents in many places enjoy the privileges, within the framework of tradition, of selecting, for their newborn children, names not infrequently endowed with special messages or associations. Conversely, few individuals are invited, encouraged, or allowed to coin novel designa- tions for, let us say, dishes or pieces of furniture. In the second half of the last century, which was marked by a new enthusiasm for science, accurate etymologizing mattered chiefly to those eager to reconstruct a plausible evolutionary chart of sounds and forms, viewed across the ages, since their development, as was then firmly believed, was governed by strict laws, best discoverable by those familiar at first hand with reliably established starting points for word trajectories. About sixty years ago, those fine French scholars Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet gave their unsurpassed etymo- logical dictionary of Latin the revealing subtitle histoire des mots, i.e., 'word biographies'. They were lucky enough to find imitators. If one looked at the biographical vicissitudes of the lexical units in that perspective, then the 'cradle' of each word was not necessarily of more compelling significance ix Preface than its subsequent transmutations, identified with heightened attention to its meaning and to the specific place it occupied within its family. For a while, the intoxicating success of 'dialect geography' compelled some of its devotees to reserve an equal share of attention to a word's temporal odyssey and to its sometimes astonishing travels through space, by way of land or sea. At that juncture one can invoke the spatio-temporal approach to etymological probing. I myself initially toyed with the idea of smuggling into the title or subtitle of this book the phrase 'lexical archaeology". In the first instance this indeed seemed defensible at that juncture, not least because it might discourage some potential readers lacking any flair for the past, any eagerness to engage in piecing together events and linking them in terms of cause and effect as closely as possible. What in the end prevented me from obeying that hunch was the disappointing discovery that archaeology is basically expected to concern itself with tangible objects as concrete witnesses to the zigzags of material civilization. (To be sure, no one denies that it can serve other, secondary, purposes as well, for example, by unravelling mytho- logical knots or by helping one to reconstruct the zigzagging course followed by the various techniques of writing.) By blindly adopting the role of a verbal archaeologist, the student of historical (or 'diachronic') linguistics would almost unavoidably agree to lean towards concentration on pic- torially representable nouns, a hazardous imbalance which, as has become clear in critical retrospect, was the chief fault of the various spokesmen for the Central European school of Worter und Sachen (i.e., of tangible objects and of the labels for them) - an approach deservedly influential half a century ago, but also dangerously one-sided and ceaselessly running the risk of exhausting itself. After all, pronouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, etc. are those ingredients of practically every language's lexis which are most likely to stimulate the imagination of any red-blooded linguist. Conversely, 'individual growth in lexis" (or, somewhat more loosely, 'individual growth in languages') underlines the legitimate and rhetorically effective contrast to 'pattern' or 'structure' or 'system', i.e., the key expressions for what represents the grammarian's delight and constitutes his principal tool of analysis, without (to revert to 'individual growth') adversely colouring this voluntary retrenchment or spontaneous limitation of the scope and style of his presentation. Perhaps the moment has now at long last arrived for stating rather bluntly what this book has not been designed to accomplish. It does not aim to serve as a manual, as a pedagogically flavoured instrument of indoctrination, advancing from the relatively simple to the admittedly sophisticated. Nor Preface will it lend service as an easily manageable 'How to ..." book, furnishing helpful bits of advice on how to learn to use certain reputable etymological dictionaries; how to ferret out relevant book reviews; how to conceive and formulate a truly original etymological idea ('guess', 'conjecture', 'hypo- thesis'); how to prove one's predecessors wrong or to disarm one's potential future critics; how to find a niche for a note or an article of one's own on an etymological issue in some highly esteemed learned journal; and the like. To use, I trust justifiably, a fairly trite phrase: etymology is going through an unprecedented crisis of self-contradiction at present, on both sides of the Atlantic (but the drama is conceivably more visible in the New World). Let me cite a few paradoxes that seem to support my contention. With the rarest of exceptions, the best of our universities hesitate to offer at any level lecture courses or seminars on etymology, although they make a calculated effort to initiate the neophyte into the fundamentals, or even the intricacies, of phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, or else pragmatics; and the same, grosso modo, holds for special linguistic summer institutes. Several influen- tial journals, including those which do not hesitate to include in their scope research in historical linguistics, nevertheless, either programmatically or, at least, in their day-to-day routine, hesitate or flatly refuse to publish perfectly legitimate inquiries into etymological issues, and so on. When a busy journal editor's attention is drawn to this disquieting state of affairs, he or she is apt to remark that some of the greatest linguistic scientists of the past, e.g., Jespersen, Sapir, Bloomfield, displayed scant excitement about etymological discoveries or controversies - a contention which, as a matter of fact, is not inaccurate but proves nothing. Should an inadequacy rank as a merit? Disturbingly, while this policy of rejection goes on, tone-setting publish- ing houses in English-speaking countries and elsewhere, in revising and bringing up to date certain classics among the dictionary ventures they have sponsored, announce loose bits of etymological information or even intro- ductory essays on etymological subjects as a newly added prestigious feature. Multi-volume etymological ventures, whether they concern lan- guages living or dead, widely-known or obscure, acknowledge support received from government agencies or private foundations, and so on. Inevitably, amid such conflicting circumstances, the questions arise; who really needs etymology, and for what purpose? And, what positions are such linguists as practise etymology (or, far more