Jump to content

User:DavidOaks/sandbox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Folk etymology, in its basic sense, refers to popularly held (and often false) beliefs about the origins of specific words and phrases, especially where these originate in "common-sense" assumptions and the construction of ex post facto narratives rather than serious research (compare folk science, folk psychology etc.).

The phenomenon leads to distinct but related usages for the phrase in historical linguistics and in folklore.

Jan Harold Brunvand defines the two usages thus:

“A process by which people either

  • (1) mispronounce or change pronunciations of foreign or strange-sounding words to make them similar to, or compatible phonologically with, other words in their lexicons,

or

  • (2) explain from hearsay evidence how particular words originated.”[1]

In its folkloric sense the term refers to the [[sometimes fanciful urban legends) constructed ex post facto to account for the current form of words and phrases. Some etymologies are part of urban legends, and seem to respond to a general taste for the surprising, counterintuitive and even scandalous. One common example has to do with the phrase rule of thumb, meaning a rough measurement. An urban legend has it that the phrase refers to an old English law under which a man could legally beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb (though no such law ever existed).[2]

The term has been used for the past century to refer to belief tales[3] about the origins of a given word or phrase.

Source and influence of false etymologies

[edit]

Erroneous etymologies can exist for many reasons. Some are reasonable interpretations of the evidence that happen to be false. For a given word there may often have been many serious attempts by scholars to propose etymologies based on the best information available at the time, and these can be later modified or rejected as linguistic scholarship advances. The results of medieval etymology, for example, were plausible given the insights available at the time, but have often been rejected by modern linguists. The etymologies of humanist scholars in the early modern period began to produce more reliable results, but many of their hypotheses have been superseded. Even today, knowledge in the field advances so rapidly that many of the etymologies in contemporary dictionaries are outdated.

Association with urban legends

[edit]

Some etymologies are part of urban legends, and seem to respond to a general taste for the surprising, counterintuitive and even scandalous. One common example has to do with the phrase rule of thumb, meaning a rough measurement. An urban legend has it that the phrase refers to an old English law under which a man could legally beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb (though no such law ever existed).[4]

In the United States, many of these scandalous legends have had to do with racism and slavery. Common words such as picnic,[5] buck,[6] and crowbar[7] have been alleged to stem from derogatory terms or racist practices. The "discovery" of these alleged etymologies is often believed by those who circulate them to draw attention to racist attitudes embedded in ordinary discourse. On one occasion, the use of the word niggardly led to the resignation of a U.S. public official because it sounded similar to the word nigger, despite the two words being unrelated etymologically.[8]


See also

[edit]

Notes

[edit]
  1. ^ American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. NY: Garland Reference Library of the Humanities
  2. ^ World Wide Words etymology of "rule of thumb"
  3. ^ ;S Eisiminger (The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 91, No. 359 (Jan. - Mar., 1978), pp. 582-584;) the narrative associated with a given etymology is called “clever story or pretty fantasy;”
  4. ^ World Wide Words etymology of "rule of thumb"
  5. ^ Urban Legends reference pages on supposed etymology of picnic
  6. ^ Urban Legends reference pages on supposed etymology of buck
  7. ^ Urban Legends reference pages on supposed origin of crowbar
  8. ^ Article on the etymology of the word niggardly



Folk etymology, in its basic sense, refers to popularly held (and often false) beliefs about the origins of specific words and phrases, especially where these originate in "common-sense" assumptions and the construction of ex post facto narratives rather than serious research (compare folk science, folk psychology etc.).

The phenomenon leads to distinct but related usages for the phrase in historical linguistics and in folklore.

Jan Harold Brunvand defines the two usages thus:

“A process by which people either

  • (1) mispronounce or change pronunciations of foreign or strange-sounding words to make them similar to, or compatible phonologically with, other words in their lexicons,

or

  • (2) explain from hearsay evidence how particular words originated.”[1]

In historical linguistics, Folk etymology is a change in the pronunciation, meaning, or spelling of a word under the influence of popular beliefs about its origins.[2][3][4][5]

Folk etymology as a productive force

[edit]

"Folk etymology", a translation of the German Volksetymologie from Ernst Förstemann's essay Ueber Deutsche Volksetymologie in the 1852 work Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete des Deutschen, Griechischen und Lateinischen (Journal of Comparative Linguistic Research in the Areas of German, Greek and Latin), is used in historical linguistics to refer a change in the form of a word caused by erroneous popular beliefs about its derivation.

Erroneous etymologies can exist for many reasons. Some are reasonable interpretations of the evidence that happen to be false. For a given word there may often have been many serious attempts by scholars to propose etymologies based on the best information available at the time, and these can be later modified or rejected as linguistic scholarship advances. The results of medieval etymology, for example, were plausible given the insights available at the time, but have mostly[citation needed] been rejected by modern linguists. The etymologies of humanist scholars in the early modern period began to produce more reliable results, but many of their hypotheses have been superseded. Until academic linguistics developed the comparative study of philology and the development of the laws underlying sound changes, the derivation of words was a matter mostly of guess-work.

The phenomenon becomes especially interesting when it feeds back into the development of the word and thus becomes a part of a new etymology. Believing a word to have a certain origin, people begin to pronounce, spell, or otherwise use the word in a manner appropriate to that perceived origin, in a kind of misplaced pedantry. Thus a new standard form of the word appears which has been influenced by the misconception. This popular etymologizing has had a powerful influence on the forms which words take. Examples in English include 'crayfish' or 'crawfish', from the French crevis; 'sand-blind', from the older samblind (i.e. semi-, half-blind); or 'chaise lounge' for the original French chaise longue.[6]

Examples of words modified by folk etymology

[edit]

In linguistic change caused by folk etymology, the form of a word changes so that it better matches its popular rationalisation. For example:

In heraldry, canting arms (which may express a name by one or more elements only significant by virtue of the supposed etymology) may reinforce a folk etymology for a noun proper, usually of a place.[citation needed]

The same process sometimes influences the spelling of proper names. The name Antony/Anthony is often spelled with an <h> because of the Elizabethan belief that it is derived from Greek ανθος (flower). In fact it is a Roman family name.

Further examples

[edit]

See the following articles that discuss folk etymologies for their subjects:

Other languages

[edit]

The French verb savoir (to know) was formerly spelled sçavoir, in order to link it with the Latin scire (to know). In fact it is derived from sapere (to be wise).

Late Latin widerdonum (Old French guerdon) was an alteration, due to confusion with Latin donum "gift", of Old High German widarlôn "recompense, reward, pay-back".

Medieval Latin has a word, bachelarius (bachelor), of uncertain origin, referring to a junior knight, and by extension to the holder of a University degree inferior to Master or Doctor. This was later re-spelled baccalaureus to reflect a false derivation from bacca laurea (laurel berry), alluding to the possible laurel crown of a poet or conqueror.

Olisipona (Lisbon) was explained as deriving from the city's supposed foundation by Ulysses (Odysseus), though the settlement certainly antedates any Greek presence.

In Southern Italy in the Greek period there was a city Maloeis (gen. Maloentos), meaning "fruitful". This was rendered in Latin as Maleventum, "ill come" or "ill wind", and renamed Beneventum ("welcome" or "good wind") after the Roman conquest.

The Dutch word for "hammock" is hangmat, ("hanging mat") formed as a folk etymology of Spanish hamaca. A similar story goes for the Swedish word hängmatta, Finnish riippumatto and the German Hängematte.

In the Alexandrian period, and in the Renaissance, many (wrongly) explained the name of the god Kronos as being derived from chronos (time), and interpreted the myth of his swallowing his children as an allegory meaning that Time consumes all things.

The Mandarin word for "crisis", wēijī, is often said to be "composed of two characters, one represent[ing] danger, and the other represent[ing] opportunity."[8] The character , however, does not mean "opportunity," and linguists generally dismiss this folk etymology as fanciful.[9][10] False etymologies for individual Chinese characters are also common.[citation needed]

The Finnish compound word for "jealous" mustasukkainen literally means "black socked" (musta "black" and sukka "sock"). However, the word is a case of a misunderstood loan translation from Swedish svartsjuk ("black sick"). The Finnish word sukka fit with a close phonological equivalent to the Swedish sjuk [11]

Islambol (Islambol as one of the names of Istanbul used after the Ottoman conquest of 1453)

Acceptance of resulting forms

[edit]

The question of whether the resulting usage is "correct" or "incorrect" is subjective and is at any rate a separate issue from the question of whether the assumed etymology is correct. When a word changes in form or meaning owing to folk etymology, there is typically resistance to the change on the part of those who are aware of the true etymology. Many words altered through folk etymology survive beyond such resistance however, to the point where they entirely replace the original form in the language. Chaise lounge and Welsh rarebit are still often disparaged, for example, but shamefaced and buttonhole are universally accepted. See prescription and description.

See also

[edit]

Notes

[edit]
  1. ^ American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. NY: Garland Reference Library of the Humanities
  2. ^ Sihler, Andrew L. (2000). Language History: an introduction. John Benjamins. pp. 86–88. ISBN 9789027236975.
  3. ^ OED, second edition, 1989.
  4. ^ R.L. Trask (1996). A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. London; New York: Routledge.
  5. ^ Sihler, Andrew L. (2000). Language History: an introduction. John Benjamins. p. 20. ISBN 9789027236975.
  6. ^ "The Origins and Development of the English Language", 4th ed., Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, 1993.
  7. ^ ""The development of Late Latin liquiritia was in part influenced by Latin liquēre become fluid, in reference to the process of treating the root to obtain its extract." Barnhart, Robert K. (1988). The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology. H.W. Wilson. p. 593. ISBN 9780824207458.
  8. ^ Remarks by President Kennedy at the Convocation of the United Negro College Fund
  9. ^ Mair, Victor H. (2005). "danger + opportunity ≠ crisis: How a misunderstanding about Chinese characters has led many astray". PinyinInfo.com. Retrieved 15 January 2009.
  10. ^ Zimmer, Benjamin (27 March 2007). "Crisis = danger + opportunity: The plot thickens". Language Log. Retrieved 19 January 2009.
  11. ^ http://kirlah-kielet.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html

References

[edit]
[edit]

Public Domain This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domainChisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)