How language evolves is better understood today because of a few obsessively written forms, and the development of comparative techniques. This is etymology, a science of irrational human culture that requires the balance of simple elegance and rigorous complexity.
The obscure science of etymology is broadly known but not widely considered. Years into a curiosity with linguistics, I picked up the 2005 book from lexicographer John Ayto called Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z.
It wasn’t quite what I expected — less a detailed account of the process and more a charming walk through hundreds of word origins to demonstrate the start and stop discovery process. It still does better convey the process, and fits alongside broader popular books on linguistics
Below are my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Linguist Anatoly Liberman (1937), who is an advocate of spelling reform
- The words “green” and “grow” share etymological roots
- Imitative terms like “moo” vary by language, noting they are informed by existing language and culture
- In etymological notation, the asterisk* indicates a word that has been reconstructed on the basis of the comparative method, rather than found in source material
- Comparative method of word reconstruction
- English has a lot of displeasing words that begin with gr- (gross, grotesque, gruesome, gruel)
- Many short familiar words are so old we don’t know their true origins, like bird, dog, girl and boy
- Boy origins: had dismissive origins early in 1240s, before evolving into opposite of girl
- “Sound and meaning are not only partners in every word; they influence each other.”
- There are only so many sound combinations so words and sounds and definitions shift
- Pimple and pumple: we assume which sound makes it bigger
- Max Müller’s (1823-1900) dismissive of Darwin’s “bow wow and pooh pooh” theory of language development, and his ding dong theory, in which words start sounding like their meaning
- Müller was challenged by William Dwight Whitney
- Comparative linguistics
- Folk etymology confuses history with the wrong assumption of old
- Bonfire isn’t Samuel Johnson’s’ a good fire but rather from bonefire because bones were once used
- Island (igland) and isle do not have same origin
- Literate people brought misspellings of foreign, rhyme and island to English
- Umble pie (of animal innards) was a thing but become humble pie
- “Etymologists should be aware of two dangerous impulses: the first is to believe one’s eyes (and ears), the other not to believe them.”
- Sometimes etymologies are easy and other times not
- Picnic, humdrum, humbug, hobnob, tidbit have lost their cutesy feel but started the same way as heebie jeebies, walkie talkie, nitty gritty, Hokey Pokey (once a word for ice cream); hoity toity, mumbo jumbo, fuzzy wuzzy, itsy bitsy, hurly burly, fuddy duddy, hodge podge (1426) and nit wit (1926), roly poly. Riffraff (1470), flim flam (1538) ping pong (1900), cross cross (1818) tip top (1860) mishmash (1450); zig zag (Robert Burns 1793)
- Razzmatazz (likely teasing corny jazz), thingmajig, finagle, and skedaddle all involve an inversion process documented by German linguist Heinrich Schroder in 1903. But this has several that look to fit but do not: boondoggle and bamboozle
- “An easily observable law governs the progress of words through history: with time, they get shorter, and shorter.”
- English old spelling and literate society locks in many etymologies
- Germanic word for man was not coined for males only (why woman ends)
- Barn is an example of disguised compound word (formerly bere for barley and ern for house)
- Frequentative verbs like sparkle, jiggle, cackle and drizzle often have the suffix -le but this can also trick you because sizzle and giggle did not originate that way
- The k in walk and talk was a suffix.
- Nickname started as “an ekename”
- Chortle was coined by Lewis Carrol
- Four major questions for word origins when evaluating similar-seeming words: which is oldest; are they all related; why did the original word last so long and what is the path of migration?
- Words die as quickly as they’re created
- Anchor and cheese and pepper are examples of Latin words that came to English through Celtic before conquest
- Norman conquest marks transition from old to Middle English (1066)
- Words change their phonetic shape and meaning — and even spelling (since there was written language)
- Romance language root is Latin which is recorded and the Germanic languages root language is not recorded (Latin is rare, especially since so many more languages are only ever oral and so are not tracked
- “To discover the origin of a word, we need cognates with comparable but nonidentical meanings”
- Difference between cognates (same root word) and borrowings is big part of the job
- “An etymologist deals with probabilities. As long as we have the support of documents we are historians.”
- “Folk etymology suggest ties based on chance resemblances.” (Galley and gallery have no relationship but tooth and German “Zahn” do)
- “Every word was coined by a resourceful individual or borrowed as a result of language contact in a certain place at a certain time”
- Discovery of the first consonant shift: “Sound laws have no exceptions”
- Linguist IM Tronskii: language is like a constellation of stars, we think they’re all similarly spaced from us but some are much older and younger and dying or growing
- Grimms law (formally introduced in 1822) began modern comparative linguistics, started to identify Proto-Indo-European language
- Words last longer if they’re friendly (mean words and insults churn faster)
- Voltaire’s apocryphal joke about etymology: in etymology vowels count for nothing and consonants for very little
- Grimm and others believed in “sound laws” that homonyms should share a root word. Not exactly so: sound and meaning both do predict but can be tricky
- Johannesson: 10% of Indo European stems were onomatopoeia similar to other languages
- Another theory: gestures gave rise to sounds
- Author is critical of many amateurs with wide explanations for word origins
- We know languages get simpler with more outside use: but did they first have to get more complex from gutteral noises?
- Corneille Kiel published in 1599 a Dutch etymology that may be the oldest known etymology dictionary with basic facts that proved valuable — unlike more ambitious but uninformed folk etymologies that followed
- In 1617, John Minsheu published first English etymology (he did ok but also fell into trap of believing Hebrew was ultimate origin language)
- “Etymology has nothing to fear. It was born with our civilization and will be the last discipline to die.”
- Enantiosemy (or a contronym) is when a word can have two opposing meanings: Dust can mean remove dust or add it (like sugar on a cake); oversight can mean close scrutiny or a mistake;