c bo 9780511611773 a 009

Cambridge Books Online

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Etymology

Yakov Malkiel

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611773

Online ISBN: 9780511611773

Hardback ISBN: 9780521323383

Paperback ISBN: 9780521311663

Chapter

Conclusion pp. 167-172

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611773.005

Cambridge University Press

Conclusion

Almost exactly a century ago etymological research reached its all-timepeak of appeal and recognition, at several levels of intellectual life. Thelegitimacy and even desirability of etymological inquiries went unchallengedin practically all advanced countries, as did the inclusion of etymology in theensemble of historico-linguistic disciplines. Ambitious scholars made apoint of their ability to engage in etymologizing, while editors of respectedlearned journals, usually characterized as 'philological', were only too eagerto reserve a prominent section of each number for brief, pungent discus-sions of this kind. Earlier pronouncements of the 'pre-scientific' era werementioned, at best, in more or less casual manner and, not infrequently, inan ironic or condescending tone.

Such a favourable situation does not at all obtain at present, but strangelyenough, the current state of affairs in the linguistic' domain is self-contradictory, with participants and policy-makers (as if to complicatethings still more) seldom stooping to ventilating such inconsistencies. Adispassionate observer quickly becomes aware of a certain confusion ofvalues, but may search in vain for any enlightening analyses of what makesetymology 'unscientific' (subjectivity of pronouncements? insufficientlyobjective tone? the general air of archaicity?).

There obtains, to begin with, a hazardous discrepancy between thedegrees of attention our societies tend to reserve for dictionary-stylecompilations of comments on word-origins as against monographic investi-gations into them. Where world languages are involved (especially such asare still living), one notices that the laconically brief identification of thebackground of each entry unquestionably has become a desideratum; infact, it serves as one of the criteria that helps a lay user distinguish betweena good and an excellent dictionary. Of course, the mandatory succinctness

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Conclusion

of each comment allows the editor to set off the dubious provenance ofcertain words solely by parenthetic qualifiers such as 'perhaps' or'probably', or else to confess 'of dubious provenance', unless simply aquestion mark in parentheses is used. The lay reader's naive curiosity maythus be momentarily aroused, but is seldom if ever satisfied, i.e., channelledinto a series of systematic assessments of probability.

On an unavoidably more limited scale, our book markets also - at leastmarginally - tolerate certain etymological dictionaries designed for special-ists and non-specialists alike, i.e., comprehensibly worded rather thanformulaically phrased. For languages such as English, French, German,Spanish, or Italian, such select dictionaries - typically compressed into asingle volume - are launched every twenty or thirty years. Then, for ancienttongues, or for languages newly discovered or for social and regionaldialects restricted in actual use, there predictably develops an, at least,temporary demand, but only among true professionals (Hittite being anexample in point). In such instances, the budgetary support of a governmentagency or of a learned society can be taken for granted, provided the qualityof the research involved justifies such subsidy.

Over against this, all told, not unencouraging landscape stands the grimpicture of today's society's almost total indifference to monographic explo-rations in this field, unless they are somehow disguised (starting with thetitles: 'word origins', 'Herkunftsworterbuch', and the like). The very term'etymology' has virtually disappeared from announcements of journal notesand articles, or from series of academy memoirs. For a young scholar, it is atpresent inadvisable, at least for career purposes in the teaching field, that heor she be known as aiming to qualify mainly as an etymologist, the way hisnext-door neighbours may safely declare their eagerness to pass off asphoneticians, phonologists, semanticists, pragmaticists, syntactitians, andthe like.

Now it is, indisputably, desirable that one should not cultivate etymologyin strict isolation. Its study can be very fruitfully combined with inquiriesinto models of regular sound change, phonosymbolism, morphology (withparticular emphasis on derivation and compounding), and so on; even acertain partnership with the fashionable probing of newly coined wordsmight be highly commendable. But society is in error if it, directly orindirectly, encourages, or even provokes, the publication of referencebooks, which, practically by definition, should contain no entirely new factsor ideas on the side of word origins, but instead, provide only novelapproaches to relationships established elsewhere, while sorely neglectingthe diffusion of purely exploratory writings.

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Conclusion

Over the last forty years or so, there have appeared, in fairly quicksuccession, introductions to the methodology (theoretical presuppositions,techniques, familiarity with auxiliary tools such as dictionaries and atlases,and so on) of etymology, as practised today in many quarters.Most - unfortunately not all - of these initiations have come from seasonedpractitioners of the discipline, call it an art or a science, and to that extentthey have been welcome indeed. But, while the methods of etymologicalinspection have indisputably undergone a change as a whole, the history orrecord of cutting a path through every language's etymological jungle is alsoapt to change radically with the pressure of time, regardless of the calendardate. To clarify this point, it is useful to operate with successive 'stages'of a typical ongoing operation. A gross division of the entire task ofetymologizing a given lexis into Stage A and Stage B may here be advisable,despite the crude simplification involved in this proposal.

At Stage A, the advance proceeds at a fairly predictable rate, assumingthe ready availability of guides to the chosen language (X) as well as to theimpressionistically (or thoroughly) identified ancestral languages (Yp Y,,Y v . . . ) as well as of tongues of the past and the present with which Xis independently known to have been in contact, friendly or hostile, atconsecutive periods.

The two preconditions additionally required for the application of thisscenario are: (a) the analyst's pre-existent familiarity with the sets of normalsound correspondences between successive phases of the growth, as well aswith the standard ranges of inflectional, derivational, and compositionalpatterns; and (b) his or her earlier exposure to the varying latitudes ofsemantic shifts. The rate of progress, I repeat, under these conditions isroughly predictable, and the punctual appearance of fascicle after fascicle ofan announced reference work can safely be guaranteed. Where the an-cestral configuration of the language at issue cannot be textually ascer-tained, it can often be reconstructed through systematic comparison with itsancestors.

As a rule, the above-stated simplistic techniques peculiar to Stage A leavea shockingly high percentage of etymological 'riddles' unsolved. Thisresidue (B), whether it comprises one quarter, one third, or one half of thewhole, is illustrative of individual developments, i.e., of word biographiesthat exhibit the more or less sporadic intervention, to varying extents, offorces that refuse to fall into any rigid schemata: lexical diffusion andcontamination; phonosymbolic appeal (or 'expressivity'); temporary avoi-dance of a given word under pressure from social taboo; interplays ofassimilatory or dissimilatory tendencies; the crystallization or dilapidation

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Conclusion

of vocalic scales; also the impacts of folk belief, mythology, materialcivilization, and playfulness, and the like. At intervals, five or more suchinterferential factors must be identified before the investigator dares tocome up with a new interpretation. Since not a few requisite discoveriestend to be made incidentally (if they turn out to be at all possible), a scholarwho espouses this philosophy cannot make firm commitments to hispublishers as to the deadline for the promised delivery of the manuscript.Given the high degree of controversiality of this kind of material, not to saythe typicality of relevant clashes of opinion, every new proposal is normallyaccompanied by a scrupulous 'historique du probleme', a requirementwhich further slows down the process of completion.

Readers will meanwhile have recognized the resemblance of Stage A tothe neogrammatical style of stringent analysis, while Style B may call upmemories of the virulent reaction to it. But the whole point of the presentstatement is not to repeat what has long been known, namely the facts thatthe neogrammarian movement reached its peak around the year 1890, whilemost of its tenets were abandoned or relaxed half a century later. Ifetymological probing in reference to a newly identified language were tostart around 1990, there would, in all likelihood, still emerge, perhapsunannounced, a Stage A, presumably with different terminological accou-trements, to be succeeded, in due time, by the advent to influence of StageB, however cleverly disguised.

Our society, by favouring the etymologically tinged dictionary, yetsimultaneously discouraging the necessarily lengthy monographs (asessayed for the first time, qua innovative genre, by Hugo Schuchardt) thusrenders a potential disservice to the steady advance of etymology.

This mild rebuke does not mean that the scholars themselves have beenconsistently blameless. The incessant launching of meagrely controlledetymological conjectures in regard to languages already well investigatedmay amount to a source of urbane entertainment for weakly motivatedreaders, but will not fail to irritate fellow-workers. Another infelicity ofwhich some of us have of late been guilty is the confusion of the formalestablishment of a corpus, whether inscriptional or culled from the testi-mony of living languages and dialects, with an etymological dictionary,which can and should be compact and may well concentrate on essentialsrather than devoting hundreds, even thousands of pages in consecutivevolumes to lexical units perfectly transparent from the start, as are mostHellenisms and Latinisms in modern languages.

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The threshing-out of such organizational disagreements can be quite asstimulating and free from acrimony as experimental returns to the dwindlingresidues of etymological unknowns.

But what is the wisdom of the moderns' occasional return to pre-1800pronouncements, especially if those verdicts, measured by present-daystandards, have turned out to be faulty? It seems permissible to furnish twoanswers to that question: first, one can expect to improve one's ownmethodology by taking into account, at intervals, the aberrations ofpioneers; second, the incidental bits of factual information that thosepace-setters, perhaps by virtue of their naivete, were sometimes in the habitof providing can turn out to be priceless.

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