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Folk etymology is a term used in two distinct ways:
- A commonly held misunderstanding of the origin of a particular word, a false etymology.
- "The popular perversion of the form of words in order to render it apparently significant"OED, second edition, 1989.; "the process by which a word or phrase, usually one of seemingly opaque formation, is arbitrarily reshaped so as to yield a form which is considered to be more transparent."R.L. Trask (1996). A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. London; New York: Routledge.
The term "folk etymology", as referring both to erroneous beliefs about derivation and the consequent changes to words, is derived from the German
Volksetymologie. Similar terms are found in other languages, e.g.
Volksetymologie itself in Dutch, Afrikaans
Volksetimologie, Danish
Folkeetymologi, Swedish
Folketymologi, and full parallels in non-Germanic languages, e.g. French
Étymologie populaire, Hungarian
Népetimológia; an example of an alternative name is Italian
Pseudoetimologia.
Folk etymology as a productive force
Folk etymology is particularly important because it can result in the modification of a word or phrase by
analogy with the erroneous etymology which is popularly believed to be true and supposed to be thus 'restored'. In such cases, 'folk etymology' is the trigger which causes the process of linguistic
analogy by which a word or phrase changes because of a popularly-held etymology, or misunderstanding of the history of a word or phrase. Here the term 'folk etymology' is also used (originally as a shorthand) to refer to the change itself, and knowledge of the popular etymology is indispensable for the (more complex) true etymology of the resulting 'hybridized' word.
Other misconceptions which leave the word unchanged may of course be ignored, but are generally not called popular etymology. The question of whether the resulting usage is "correct" or "incorrect" depends on one's notion of correctness and is in any case distinct from the question of whether a given etymology is correct.
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, sometimes right but more often wrong, based on superficial resemblances of form and the like. This popular etymology has had a powerful influence on the forms which words take (e.g. crawfish or crayfish, from the French
crevis, modern crevisse, or sand-blind, from samblind, i.e. semi-, half-blind), and has frequently been the occasion of homonyms resulting from different etymologies for what appears a single word, with the original meaning(s) reflecting the true etymology and the new meaning(s) reflecting the 'incorrect' popular etymology.
Examples of words modified by folk etymology
In linguistic change caused by folk etymology, the form of a word changes so that it better matches its popular rationalisation. For example:
- Old English sam-blind ("semi-blind" or "half-blind") became Wiktionary:sand-blind (as if "blinded by the sand") when people were no longer able to make sense of the element sam ("half").
- Old English Wiktionary:bryd-guma ("bride-man") became Wiktionary:bridegroom after the Old English word Wiktionary:guma fell out of use and made the compound semantically obscure.
- The silent s in Wiktionary:island is a result of folk etymology. This native Old English word, at one time spelled iland, derives from an Old English compound of īeg or īg + land, but was erroneously believed to be related to "Wiktionary:isle", which had come to English via Old French from Latin Wiktionary:insula ("island"; cf. Modern Spanish language isla). Old English īeg, īg derives from Germanic *aujō = "object on the water", from earlier Germanic *agwjō, and is akin to Old English ēa = "water", "river", from prehistoric Germanic *ahwō. Hence through *ahwō, Wiktionary:island is related, not to Latin Wiktionary:insula, but rather to Latin Wiktionary:aqua ("water"). (For a use of ēa, see Eton, Berkshire, Origin of the Name.).
More recent examples:
Other changes due to folk etymology include:
When a back-formation rests on a misunderstanding of the morphology of the original word, it may be regarded as a kind of folk etymology.
In heraldry, a rebus coat-of-arms (which expresses 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.
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, probably meaning something like "ancient".
Further examples
See the following articles that discuss folk etymologies for their subjects:
Other languages
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).
The spelling of the English word
posthumous reflects a belief that it is derived from Latin
post humum, literally "after the earth", in other words after burial. In fact the Latin
postumus is an old superlative of
post (after), formed in the same way as
optimus and
ultimus.
The spelling of the English word
lethal reflects a belief that it is derived from Lethe, the river in the mythological kingdom of the dead. In fact it comes from the unconnected Latin word
letum, meaning death.
In British English, aubergines are sometimes called "mad apples". The Italian word for the aubergine is
:it:melanzana, which was misheard as
mela insana.
Medieval Latin has a word,
bachelarius (Bachelor#Etymology and historical meanings), 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 Benevento ("well come" or "good wind") after the Roman conquest.
In the Alexandrian period, and in the Renaissance, many (wrongly) explained the name of the god Cronus 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 American Grizzly bear is so named because its hair is
wiktionary:grizzly or silver-tipped, but its name was later mistakenly derived from
wiktionary:grisly meaning “horrible”. This error has been perpetuated in the grizzly bear's scientific
Trinomen:
Ursus arctos horribilis.
Acceptability of resulting forms
The question of whether the resulting usage is "correct" or "incorrect" depends on one's notion of correctness; at any rate it is a separate issue from the question of whether the assumed etymology is correct. When a confused understanding of etymology produces a new form today, there is typically resistance to it on the part of those who see through the confusion, but there is no question of long-established words being considered wrong because folk etymology has affected them.
Chaise lounge and
Welsh rarebit are disparaged by many, but
shamefaced and
buttonhole are universally accepted. See prescription and description.
See also
References
- Anatoly Liberman (2005). Word Origins ... and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195161472.
- Adrian Room (1986). Dictionary of True Etymologies. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7102-0340-3.
- David Wilton (2004). Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517284-1.
External links
- Richard Lederer, Spook Etymology on the Internet
- Popular fallacies in the attribution of phrase origins
- EtymologyOnLine - both true and folk etymologies- here mainly examples of popular etymologies
References
Folk etymology is a term used in two distinct ways:
- A commonly held misunderstanding of the origin of a particular word, a false etymology.
- "The popular perversion of the form of words in order to render it apparently significant"OED, second edition, 1989.; "the process by which a word or phrase, usually one of seemingly opaque formation, is arbitrarily reshaped so as to yield a form which is considered to be more transparent."R.L. Trask (1996). A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. London; New York: Routledge.
The term "folk etymology", as referring both to erroneous beliefs about derivation and the consequent changes to words, is derived from the German
Volksetymologie. Similar terms are found in other languages, e.g.
Volksetymologie itself in Dutch, Afrikaans
Volksetimologie, Danish
Folkeetymologi, Swedish
Folketymologi, and full parallels in non-Germanic languages, e.g. French
Étymologie populaire, Hungarian
Népetimológia; an example of an alternative name is Italian
Pseudoetimologia.
Folk etymology as a productive force
Folk etymology is particularly important because it can result in the modification of a word or phrase by
analogy with the erroneous etymology which is popularly believed to be true and supposed to be thus 'restored'. In such cases, 'folk etymology' is the trigger which causes the process of linguistic analogy by which a word or phrase changes because of a popularly-held etymology, or misunderstanding of the history of a word or phrase. Here the term 'folk etymology' is also used (originally as a shorthand) to refer to the change itself, and knowledge of the popular etymology is indispensable for the (more complex) true etymology of the resulting 'hybridized' word.
Other misconceptions which leave the word unchanged may of course be ignored, but are generally not called popular etymology. The question of whether the resulting usage is "correct" or "incorrect" depends on one's notion of correctness and is in any case distinct from the question of whether a given etymology is correct.
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, sometimes right but more often wrong, based on superficial resemblances of form and the like. This popular etymology has had a powerful influence on the forms which words take (e.g. crawfish or crayfish, from the French
crevis, modern crevisse, or sand-blind, from samblind, i.e. semi-, half-blind), and has frequently been the occasion of
homonyms resulting from different etymologies for what appears a single word, with the original meaning(s) reflecting the true etymology and the new meaning(s) reflecting the 'incorrect' popular etymology.
Examples of words modified by folk etymology
In linguistic change caused by folk etymology, the form of a word changes so that it better matches its popular rationalisation. For example:
- Old English sam-blind ("semi-blind" or "half-blind") became Wiktionary:sand-blind (as if "blinded by the sand") when people were no longer able to make sense of the element sam ("half").
- Old English Wiktionary:bryd-guma ("bride-man") became Wiktionary:bridegroom after the Old English word Wiktionary:guma fell out of use and made the compound semantically obscure.
- The silent s in Wiktionary:island is a result of folk etymology. This native Old English word, at one time spelled iland, derives from an Old English compound of īeg or īg + land, but was erroneously believed to be related to "Wiktionary:isle", which had come to English via Old French from Latin Wiktionary:insula ("island"; cf. Modern Spanish language isla). Old English īeg, īg derives from Germanic *aujō = "object on the water", from earlier Germanic *agwjō, and is akin to Old English ēa = "water", "river", from prehistoric Germanic *ahwō. Hence through *ahwō, Wiktionary:island is related, not to Latin Wiktionary:insula, but rather to Latin Wiktionary:aqua ("water"). (For a use of ēa, see Eton, Berkshire, Origin of the Name.).
More recent examples:
Other changes due to folk etymology include:
- Wiktionary:buttonhole from Wiktionary:buttonhold (originally a loop of string that held a button down)
- Charterhouse from Chartreuse, the feminine of Chartreux
- Wiktionary:hangnail from Wiktionary:agnail
- Wiktionary:penthouse from Wiktionary:pentice
- Wiktionary:shamefaced from Wiktionary:shamefast ("caught in shame")
- Wiktionary:chaise lounge from Wiktionary:chaise longue ("long chair")
- Wiktionary:lanthorn from Wiktionary:lantern (as old lanterns were glazing with strips of cows' horn (anatomy))
- A slug of liquor from the Irish word slog, meaning to swallow
When a back-formation rests on a misunderstanding of the morphology of the original word, it may be regarded as a kind of folk etymology.
In heraldry, a rebus coat-of-arms (which expresses 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.
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, probably meaning something like "ancient".
Further examples
See the following articles that discuss folk etymologies for their subjects:
Other languages
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).
The spelling of the English word
posthumous reflects a belief that it is derived from Latin
post humum, literally "after the earth", in other words after burial. In fact the Latin
postumus is an old superlative of
post (after), formed in the same way as
optimus and
ultimus.
The spelling of the English word
lethal reflects a belief that it is derived from Lethe, the river in the mythological kingdom of the dead. In fact it comes from the unconnected Latin word
letum, meaning death.
In British English,
aubergines are sometimes called "mad apples". The Italian word for the aubergine is
:it:melanzana, which was misheard as
mela insana.
Medieval Latin has a word,
bachelarius (
Bachelor#Etymology and historical meanings), 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
Benevento ("well come" or "good wind") after the Roman conquest.
In the Alexandrian period, and in the
Renaissance, many (wrongly) explained the name of the god
Cronus 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 American Grizzly bear is so named because its hair is
wiktionary:grizzly or silver-tipped, but its name was later mistakenly derived from
wiktionary:grisly meaning “horrible”. This error has been perpetuated in the grizzly bear's scientific
Trinomen:
Ursus arctos horribilis.
Acceptability of resulting forms
The question of whether the resulting usage is "correct" or "incorrect" depends on one's notion of correctness; at any rate it is a separate issue from the question of whether the assumed etymology is correct. When a confused understanding of etymology produces a new form today, there is typically resistance to it on the part of those who see through the confusion, but there is no question of long-established words being considered wrong because folk etymology has affected them.
Chaise lounge and
Welsh rarebit are disparaged by many, but
shamefaced and
buttonhole are universally accepted. See prescription and description.
See also
- Back-formation
- Eggcorn
- False etymology
- Slang dictionary
References
- Anatoly Liberman (2005). Word Origins ... and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195161472.
- Adrian Room (1986). Dictionary of True Etymologies. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7102-0340-3.
- David Wilton (2004). Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517284-1.
External links
- Richard Lederer, Spook Etymology on the Internet
- Popular fallacies in the attribution of phrase origins
- EtymologyOnLine - both true and folk etymologies- here mainly examples of popular etymologies
References
Folk etymology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Folk etymology is a term used in two distinct ways: A commonly held misunderstanding of the origin of a particular word, a false etymology. "The popular perversion of the form of ...
Popular Etymology
Popular Etymology The Oxford English Dictionary reserves its most withering scorn for the peddlers in popular etymology. The Words
popular etymology - Definition at Your Dictionary
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False etymology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Folk etymology or popular etymology are established terms for a false etymology that grows up anonymously in popular lore. A modern folk etymology may be thought of as a linguistic ...
popular etymology definition |Dictionary.com
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Nationmaster Encyclopedia Popular Etymology
folk etymology: Definition from Answers.com
This popular etymology has had a powerful influence on the forms which words take (e.g. crawfish or crayfish, from the French crevis, modern crevisse, or sand-blind, from samblind ...
etymology - Definition at Your Dictionary
Finally an idea of the rivalry which exists between Adun villages may be given by studying the popular etymology of the village names. Chinese:
Amazon.com: "popular etymology": Key Phrase page
Key Phrase page for popular etymology: Books containing the phrase popular etymology ... Excerpt - on Page 183: " ... to the pronun- ciation and word structure of their own ...
popular definition |Dictionary.com
popular etymology ... adjective . 1. regarded with favor, approval, or affection by people in general: a ...
