Talk:Etymology/Archive 1

[The following is pasted up as best as I can from long-term mutilated/vandalised original content Bjenks (talk) 04:23, 29 May 2009 (UTC)]

At the beginning of the article shouldn't it be "when they enter a language" rather than "when they enter a study"? Also, "and what not" isn't very precise, is it?

English's closest relative

"German is English's closest relative". Not so. English's closest relatives are Scots, Frisian, Dutch/Flemish, and Low German, and only then (High) German. How should this be worded in the article? -phma

Are you talking about how closely related the people are, or the languages? It sounds like you're talking about people.

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How of etymology. --Ed Poor

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Frisian is considered English's closest relative, because 'genetic proximity' of written languages are measured by the earliest written forms - Old English is closer to Old Frisian than it is to any other language. Therefore Frisian and English are said to be sister languages (in fact each other's only sister language)- fascinating considering one is spoken by several hundred million people, while the other is spoken by scarcely one half million.

While its true that most of the orginal lexemes of the English language (those in Old English also known as Anglo-Saxon) were germanic (and highly akin to languages such as modern Dutch, German, Icelandic, and particularly to Frisian, the Norman invasion of 1066 altered the state of the language; for 300 years French was the language of administration and was the language of the upper or noble classes. As a result of the flowering of French cultural influences in Great Britain, words derived from the French now comprise the majority of all roots in the English language - these roots, in turn owe heavily to the Greek, but particulary to Latin. Still, the most common roots, those for words which we uttter most frequently, have remained Germanic. For instance if one were to list the hundred most used words in the language, they would ALL be of Germanic derivation, whereas a list of ALL roots in the language would show an overwhelming majority of French roots.(with Latin via French and Greek via. French)

Also, while indeed most English words were originally French, there are many cases in which two roots, one french and one english exist to name the same concept. For instance, lamb and mutton, lamb being germanic, mutton from the french "mouton" meaning also 'lamb'. Such situations often arose where Britain's norman nobility called something by one name while the peasants who served them called it another.

Anyway, another notable contributer of roots to the English language was the old norse by way of the Danish and Norwegian varieties. Northen Britain was subject to viking invasions over a period of centuries. Since the vikings and anglo-saxons were already strongly linguistically related the new lexical introductions can be difficult to spot, often emerging because of slight differences in norse and anglo-saxon pronunciations of what were originally the same root. For instance 'bath' and 'bask', the former anglo-saxon, the later norse, both originally meaning the same thing, 'to bathe', both maintaining now separate existances because of a phenomenon whereby 'shades of meaning' differentiated the two. Similarly, the above noted "mutton" and "lamb" can continue to exist side by side because chefs now make a distinction between 'type' of lamb - originally such a distinction was absent. Apart from introducing new words itself, the viking invasion period made caused the first general weaking of the anglo-saxon grammatic structure. The germanic languages grammar is such that a great deal of information is conveyed with case endings and vowel changes. Consider "ride, riding, ridden, rode, rider, rides, rides". In many cases, the anglo-saxon and viking many (is not this word "way" ? S.J.) of declining or grammatically mutating such a root to express case was perfectly similar to that of the anglo-saxon, however in many cases there was disagreement - an ending such as -en might mean something completely different in the english than in the norse for a given word or idea. In such cases, both choices of ending, either norse or anglo-saxon were simply dropped altogether, leaving the root unnatached.

This brings us back to the later Norman French invasion and a fascinating reason for the strong replacement of English roots by French ones - ultimately, the norse invasions had already earlier caused a situation whereby anglo-saxon roots began to operate independant of any case modifications either to themselves, or as reflected in what had been previously words necessary to agree with them. Hence, later French introductions, many of which could not possibly have been brought into the more conservitive Germanic grammatical structure of the original angles and saxons, were that much easier to replace into the softened up post viking invasion english.

Tridesch

You should put that in the article.

67.125.208.107 05:13, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yes, also that the normans that invaded England did not speak a germanic language any more, having lived in France for centuries ! They were actually speaking a dialect of old french to which today Normand an Picard languages are probably very close, or at least the closest. stephane.jourdan gmail ; the page 'Norman conquest' says : "Anglo-Norman, a northern dialect of Old French" actually that language had neither "anglo" neither "nordman" characteristics, it was a "langue d'oïl" language, I think. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.92.239.145 (talk) 04:56, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

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I am a native Frisian speaker myself. While I am not an expert on languages, I see the more basic words that are kept intact over years between Frisian and English. Some examples:

English - Frisian - Dutch - German

Church - Tsjerke - Kerk - Kirche (Note that the "Ch" and the "Tsj" are pronounced the same way whilst they are pronouncend completely different in Dutch and German)

More obvious is Cheese:

Cheese - Tsiis - Kaas - Käse (Dutch and German are completely different while English and Frisian are pronounced almost the same)

Many other wolrds are pronounced almost the same in English and Frisian, while they are pronounced different in Dutch and German:

Old - Âld - Oud - Alt

Sheep - Skiep - Schaap - Schafe

Lead - Lied - Leid - Führen (In dutch, "voeren" can be used as well which is similar to the german führen)

Beef/Boeuf

The common belief about the origins of English/French word pairs for animals and food was described by Robert Burchfield in The English Language (ISBN 0192891618) as "no more than a half-truth". He pointed out that, though the French terms entered English in the early Middle Ages, they did not take on their exclusively culinary meanings until the 18th century. Before the 18th century, "muttons" and "beeves" were animals. -- Heron

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Is there a list of etymology lists/topics apart from the one in this article ? Jay 15:17, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

OK I created one ! Lists of etymologies. Jay 17:16, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I agree.............

A nuncle?

The etymology of the word "uncle" comes from Norman French and can be traced back to the Latin word "avunculus". I can find no evidence for a past form "nuncle". For an example of a word in which this phenomenon actually happened, consider "an apron", which came from "a napron". http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=apron&x=25&y=1

Yes, that does seem strange. I presume that this process occurred twice: once (either before or after the Norman conquest) giving us "nuncle", and then again giving us "uncle". — Chameleon My page/My talk 09:57, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Nuncle is not part of the etymology of uncle, but it is listed in the OED as a "variant of UNCLE with transferred n", which now remains only in dialects. There are quotes from Shakespeare (King Lear) and John Dryden (Wild Gallant). The latest quote is from 1760. -- Heron 15:02, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

logos

(i study greek and im pretty certain that the word 'logos' actually means, word or speech, im not sure about the etymos bit bit i have a suspicion that it doesn not mean 'of a word' as this would be extremely repetitive.)

Etymological dictionary article needed

Yesterday I had cause to use some etymological dictionaries for Caucasian languages. As a linguistics hobbyist I realize I wasn't quite prepared for using such a dictionary. They seem to be sufficiently specialised that we could benefit from an article on their history, usage, etc right here in Wikipedia. Would anybody like to give it a stab? — Hippietrail 03:16, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Why does this article even exist?

Well, I can see having a short article explaining very briefly what the word etymology means, and its, um, etymology, but shouldn't this article be pointing people at Historical linguistics?

This article, as it stands, is also full of little things that make my trained-linguist's mind go "WTF?" For example: "Slang words may enter the common language. Sometimes, common words become slang." Um, if etymology offers accounts of how a language came to have word X, well, if the word X was first a slang word, then the language already had word X, and to say that it became common usage does not explain how the word entered the language. An even bigger shocker: the implication that if a word is "slang," it is not in common usage. (There's relatively few words in English in more common usage than the slang term fuck, for example.)

Of course, what I sense here is the good old bias against oral language: what the author must have been thinking when s/he wrote "common usage" is written usage, which, in their mind, constitutes the "real" language. This is particularly problematic when the article in question is linked from the sidebar in the template for linguistics articles. (And I also question that placement; etymologies of individual words are just not something that linguists really care about profoundly.) Sacundim 5 July 2005 15:59 (UTC)

• Why does this little rant even exist? I can't tell if you're more upset about the placement of this etymology page within the linguistics template on Wikipedia or if you just don't think etymology is a meritous subfield of linguistics. For somone obviously familiar with descriptivism (i.e. non-prescriptivism) you sure like making sweeping statements about linguists: "etymologies of individual words are just not something that linguists really care about profoundly." To borrow a term from you: WTF? Does that mean that etymologists aren't linguists?--Hraefen 16:20, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't know where to put this

I'm not sure which page this should go on. I noticed a similarity in numbers of Latin/Greek and Sanskrit, though Sanskrit is supposed to be completely different. (The Greek and Latin numbers are actually the English roots based on those languages, as it is based on the table [[1]]). The obvious similarities are in bold.

Numeral	Latin	Greek	Sanskrit
1	un	mono	eka
2	duo, bi	di	dvi
3	tre	tri	tri
4	quadra	tetra	chatu
5	quint	pent	pancha
6	sexa	hexa	shha
7	septa	hepta	sapta
8	octa	octa	ashhta
9	nona	ennea	nava
10	deci	deka	dasha

Twilight Realm 23:03, September 12, 2005 (UTC)

If you discovered that by yourself, then well done, but the similarity was noted by Franz Bopp in 1816 and is why Greek, Latin and Sanskrit are all classified as Indo-European languages. Have a look at that last article and see if your table could fit in there. --Heron 17:24, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Sanskrit is an Indo-European language? If you look at the article for Sanskrit, the chart on the right looks (to me) like it's a list of four main language families. Indo-European and Sanskrit look like they are both on the same level of classification, which implies that they are unrelated, or else both decended from another, older language. Is there any way that could be clarified? Also, could someone fix that table? I don't know how to do the format, I just copied it from another page and changed a few things, and I don't know how to get rid of that column on the right. Twilight Realm 21:08, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I don't have any source for this but I remember from a class that Sanskrit was descended at least in part from Aryan, which would have been an Indo-European. NemoX 05:12, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

from slashdot

Except that historical linguists don't really care about the origins of words; they care about the origin of languages. If you take a course in historical linguistics (and I have taken such a course), you're going to spend your time learning and practicing the comparative method [wikipedia.org], not researching etymologies of words; and you're going to get the idea drilled into your head that the origins of individual words is not what matters, but rather, systematic structural correspondences between languages. Etymology is not really a subfield of historical linguistics, contrary to what the article states in the first sentence; it's largely trivial, and mostly irrelevant to the real subject matter. The article was evidently written by one of those layperson language enthusiasts, who tend to think of language as a big bag of words (as opposed to structural arrangements of words), and therefore, that the task of historical linguistics must obviously be to list the origin of each word." [2] WAS 4.250 20:08, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Let me, as a professional comparative linguist, comment some of the claims.

• "Except that historical linguists don't really care about the origins of words; they care about the origin of languages... the origins of individual words is not what matters, but rather, systematic structural correspondences between languages."

But studying the etymologies of individual words is not in any way opposed to the study of regular correspondences between languages. In fact, it is necessary to study etymology in order to demonstrate regular correspondences between langauges. For example, no one could demonstrate regular sound correspondences between the Indo-European languages without also pointing out words which exhibit these correspondences, and hence making etymological claims. This means that etymology is an integral, inseparable part of comparative linguistics.

• "Etymology is not really a subfield of historical linguistics, contrary to what the article states in the first sentence; it's largely trivial, and mostly irrelevant to the real subject matter."

This is nonsense. For example: is it "trivial" that English feather is ultimately related to the pet- in petition, from Latin? No. It takes thorough comparative study, applying the methods of comprative linguistics, to establish etymological connections. It is of course true that the primary task of historical linguistics is not to explain the origin of words; but it is makes no sense to claim that because of this historical linguistics cares nothing about the origin of words.

It is, of course, another thing that the actual article is terrible. It does not explain anything about the methods that comparative linguists use in studying etymology. Instead, banal observations and marginal phenomena such as acronyms are given as "Basic ideas in etymology". This gives the reader a really distorted picture of what etymology is about. --AAikio 12:04, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

About your last point: I agree. That section seems to belong in an introductional paragraph of Lexical and semantic change or something. --Kjoonlee 12:17, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I coult try to expand the intro as well as rewrite the "basic ideas" section in the near future. I'd be very glad to hear suggestions. I'd propose the inclusion of at least the following topics:

• Types of word origins: what historical linguistics knows of how words originate
• The role of etymology in comparative linguistics: 1) the relationship etymology and the comparative method; 2) reconstructing language contacts with the help of etymology (loanwords); 3) linguistic palaentology.
• Methods used of etymology, e.g.:

• Sound corresepondences, historical phonology, nativization of loanwords
• Study of semantic change, semantic parallels
• Cultural / historical clues of word origins

• Lexical stratification: establishing a series of distinct periods of innovation in the lexicon and tracing the sources of the changes.

--AAikio 13:18, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

• Yes, this article is pretty horrible. I've though about improving it myself, but I decided to create pages of etymolgies instead. Go figure. One suggestion that I'd make is to broaden the scope of the page i.e. make it less focused on English etymology. Until reading some of the comments on this talk page, I was not aware that some people within linguistic fields really doubt the significance of etymology. My theory is that they have to try to discredit something which they know little of. Yet on some level they realize that it's a hole in their knowledge. In any case, cleaning this page up will make it more clear to people how etymology relates to linguistics overall. Good luck.--Hraefen 14:29, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

• I now made a few changes in the beginning of the article. Note also that I deleted the entire list titled "Basic ideas in etymology" due to the reasons discussed above. Please let me know what you think. There's certainly still a lot that could be improved here. --AAikio 07:37, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Syllogism?

Etymology:Scholarship::Pun:Humor. I used to think that was too flip. --Wetman 10:56, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Lagniappe

The etymology given for lagniappe was recently changed from Quechua to French and this is likely due to Wetman using dictionary with incomplete etymologies. Having said that, I realize that not all sources agree about the derivation of lagniappe, so I suggest replacing it in that section with a word of certain American (i.e. Americas/Indigenous) origina such as tomato, llama, etc. Any suggestions anyone? I'll be doing this fairly soon if no one objects.--Hraefen 17:38, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Why does this article even exist?

Well, I can see having a short article explaining very briefly what the word etymology means, and its, um, etymology, but shouldn't this article be pointing people at Historical linguistics?

This article, as it stands, is also full of little things that make my trained-linguist's mind go "WTF?" For example: "Slang words may enter the common language. Sometimes, common words become slang." Um, if etymology offers accounts of how a language came to have word X, well, if the word X was first a slang word, then the language already had word X, and to say that it became common usage does not explain how the word entered the language. An even bigger shocker: the implication that if a word is "slang," it is not in common usage. (There's relatively few words in English in more common usage than the slang term fuck, for example.)

Of course, what I sense here is the good old bias against oral language: what the author must have been thinking when s/he wrote "common usage" is written usage, which, in their mind, constitutes the "real" language. This is particularly problematic when the article in question is linked from the sidebar in the template for linguistics articles. (And I also question that placement; etymologies of individual words are just not something that linguists really care about profoundly.) Sacundim 5 July 2005 15:59 (UTC)

• Why does this little rant even exist? I can't tell if you're more upset about the placement of this etymology page within the linguistics template on Wikipedia or if you just don't think etymology is a meritous subfield of linguistics. For somone obviously familiar with descriptivism (i.e. non-prescriptivism) you sure like making sweeping statements about linguists: "etymologies of individual words are just not something that linguists really care about profoundly." To borrow a term from you: WTF? Does that mean that etymologists aren't linguists?--Hraefen 16:20, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Is there a proper Wikipedia policy about etymologies?

Is there a proper Wikipedia policy about etymologies? A template maybe?

There's a discussion about deleting a Hebrew term template. I think that it's not inherently bad, but a better idea would be to have a proper etymology template.--Amir E. Aharoni 07:07, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

I think the paragraph that discusses the etymology of the word etymology on this page should be under an etymology section heading. Tomjoad187 08:48, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Etymologies of names are quite often too speculative to be regarded as encyclopedic content. As an example one can take the name of Attila. It would seem that we know far too little about the Huns and the Hunnic languages to even think about an etymology. Suppose that we would know as much about the English name "Pete". No doubt, someone would propose that name was associated with peat bogs, maybe even suggesting the hypothesis that "Pete" was a kind of religious title for the executioner performing human sacrifices of bog bodies. Not a single researcher would have guessed that the english name had a greek etymology, going back to arameic Cephas = "rock". /Pieter Kuiper 15:40, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Who's Pete? I just think there should be an etymology for the word etymology. Like "etym" meaning word, and "ology" meaning study of. It would blow my mind... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tomjoad187 (talk • contribs) 00:25, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Polymerisation

Someone wrote:

• (An interesting point to note is that linguistic etymology is very similar to calculations of the processes of polymerisation in Chemistry).

I'm sure there is something interesting in this, but the comment as it stands is useless without any further explanation. --Heron 17:55, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Two notes

1. This sentence was (re-?)introduced by Pmanderson in the section on "History of etymology": "since Jane Ellen Harrison, one of the recognized functions of myths has been to explain archaic rituals that were no longer comprehensible." - maybe I'm being obtuse, but I can't quite comprehend the relevance of that statement in that context. Can someone explain?
2. The same section criticises the modern allegedly "uncritical" acceptance of the traditional etymology linking Syncretism with Crete. However, the discussion page Talk:Syncretism shows that this etymology seems really to be accepted in informed modern scholarship. Unless people like Dbachmann in that discussion were using the wrong sources, isn't the critical statement here an instance of OR, to the degree that it insinuates that the position taken by modern scholarship is false? -- Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:08, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Etymology...

...can be described as the study of "bugs" in the language. :) Wahkeenah 14:05, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Siberian Wikipedia

Editors of this article may be interested in the proposal for closing the Siberian Wikipedia, on which a vote is currently being held in Meta. Please, take the "Addressing sockpuppetry" warning into consideration. - Best regards, Evv 04:44, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

When does a word change languages?

When does a french or spanish word become used enough by english speakers to make it an english word?--Niro5 20:08, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

TERRIBLE FORMAT!!!!

I do not know how, which way and what to correct, but here the format needs urgent correction!!!Undead Herle King 12:35, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Entomology?

Frequent confusion with Entomology? anon <<09:09, 05 October 2007 (UTC)>>

Warning

"Not to be confused with Entomology, the scientific study of insects, despite similar etymology."

I thought that was quite clever. Well done. Merpin 02:26, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

venison

does anyone no who what when where about venison ??? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jered-ramsey (talk • contribs) 19:44, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

probably from french "venaison" = meat from animals killed by hunting. (Veneur = hunter) stephane.jourdan gmail —Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.92.239.145 (talk) 04:51, 20 June 2008 (UTC)