The Problem of So-Called “Folk” Etymologies

The study of etymologizing—of the techniques and theories of word-derivations in different cultures—as distinct from the study of etymologies themselves, might appear, to an outsider, a dull if necessary aspect of linguistics and critical philology. However, closer examination of some of the varying uses of etymologies and related forms of wordplay in different cultures, and of the divergent views of language that these uses encode, reveals that the topic is far from trivial. On the contrary, such linguistic forms tell us much about the ways in which language, the physical world, and especially the relation between the two have been conceived. The present essay compares and contrasts etymologizing and some related forms of language in the classical Hindu and modern British traditions as a preliminary effort toward understanding the differences between the “linguistic ideologies” of those traditions.

Scholars of ancient Indian languages have paid greater attention recently to the function of etymologizing and para-etymological word manipulations within the traditions they study, in part because these represent such prominent and distinctive features of these traditions, and in part to correct earlier dismissals of such verbal forms by Western scholars. Friedrich Max Müller's (1823-1900) statement that “a sound etymology has nothing to do with sound” (Müller 1877: 59), although directed at unscientific linguists in Europe, also captured an attitude common among earlier European scholars, including Müller himself, toward some of the etymological speculations within the Hindu tradition.