[BOOK IV]
THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE
[CHAPTER XVI]
ETYMOLOGY
§ 1. Achievements. § 2. Doubtful Cases. § 3. Facts, not Fancies. § 4. Hope. § 5. Requirements. § 6. Blendings. § 7. Echo Words. § 8. Some Conjunctions. § 9. Object of Etymology. § 10. Reconstruction.
XVI.—§ 1. Achievements.
Few things have been more often quoted in works on linguistics than Voltaire’s mot that in etymology vowels count for nothing and consonants for very little. But it is now said just as often that the satire might be justly levelled at the pseudo-scientific etymology of the eighteenth century, but has no application to our own times, in which etymology knows how to deal with both vowels and consonants, and—it should be added, though it is often forgotten—with the meanings of words. One often comes across outbursts of joy and pride in the achievements of modern etymological science, like the following, which is quoted here instar omnium: “Nowadays etymology has got past the period of more or less ‘happy thoughts’ (glücklichen einfälle) and has developed into a science in which, exactly as in any other science, serious persevering work must lead to reliable results” (H. Schröder, Ablautstudien, 1910, X; cf. above, Max Müller and Whitney, p. 89).
There is no denying that much has been achieved, but it is equally true that a skeptical mind cannot fail to be struck with the uncertainty of many proposed explanations: very often scholars have not got beyond ‘happy thoughts,’ many of which have not even been happy enough to have been accepted by anybody except their first perpetrators. From English alone, which for twelve hundred years has had an abundant written literature, and which has been studied by many eminent linguists, who have had many sister-languages with which to compare it, it would be an easy matter to compile a long list of words, well-known words of everyday occurrence, which etymologists have had to give up as beyond their powers of solution (fit, put, pull, cut, rouse, pun, fun, job). And equally perplexing are many words now current all over Europe, some of them comparatively recent and yet completely enigmatic: race, baron, baroque, rococo, zinc.
XVI.—§ 2. Doubtful Cases.
Or let us take a word of that class which forms the staple subject of etymological disquisitions, one in which the semantic side is literally as clear as sunshine, namely the word for ‘sun.’ Here we have, among others, the following forms: (1) sun, OE. sunne, Goth. sunno; (2) Dan., Lat. sol, Goth. sauil, Gr. hḗlios; (3) OE. sigel, sægl, Goth. sugil; (4) OSlav. slǔnǐce, Russ. solnce (now with mute l). That these forms are related cannot be doubted, but their mutual relation, and their relation to Gr. selḗnē, which means ‘moon,’ and to OE. swegel ‘sky,’ have never been cleared up. Holthausen derives sunno from the verb sinnan ‘go’ and OE. sigel from the verb sigan ‘descend, go down’—but is it really probable that our ancestors should have thought of the sun primarily as the one that goes, or that sets? The word south (orig. *sunþ; the n as in OHG. sund is still kept in Dan. sønden) is generally explained as connected with sun, and the meaning ‘sunny side’ is perfectly natural; but now H. Schröder thinks that it is derived from a word meaning ‘right’ (OE. swiðre, orig. ‘stronger,’ a comparative of the adj. found in G. geschwind), and he says that the south is to the right when you look at the sun at sunrise—which is perfectly true, but why should people have thought of the south as being to the right when they wanted to speak of it in the afternoon or evening?