The two senses of etymology : A concise history

2.1Ancient etymology

Both studies in cultural history and in the history of linguistics gather under the heading “etymology” texts from different ages and places which all had a tremendous and lasting impact on the intellectual life of the respective cultures: examples range from Plato’s Cratylus to Yāska’s Nirukta, written respectively in 4th century bce’s Greece and between the 4th and the end of the 3rd century bce in India, to Varro’s Lingua Latina (Rome, 1st century bce), Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae sive Origines (Spain, early 7th century) and beyond.22.A reader including excerpts from these and other texts from different cultures, with bibliographical references, is offered in Most et al. (2023)Most, Glenn, Dagmar Schäfer & Michele Loporcaro 2023 “Part 2. Etymology: Introduction”. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in many tongues ed. by Glenn Most, Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 93–126. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Most, Glenn, Dagmar Schäfer & Michele Loporcaro 2023 “Part 2. Etymology: Introduction”. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in many tongues ed. by Glenn Most, Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 93–126. Leiden & Boston: Brill. , which takes a cultural-history perspective. From a (history of) linguistics perspective, cf. (among many) Pfister & Lupis (2001Pfister, Max & Antonio Lupis 2001 Introduzione all’etimologia romanza. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino [extended Italian translation of Max Pfister, Einführung in die romanische Etymologie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1980].Pfister, Max & Antonio Lupis 2001 Introduzione all’etimologia romanza. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino [extended Italian translation of Max Pfister, Einführung in die romanische Etymologie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1980].: 7–36), Belardi (2002)Belardi, Walter 2002 L’etimologia nella storia della cultura occidentale. 2 vols. Rome: Il Calamo.Belardi, Walter 2002 L’etimologia nella storia della cultura occidentale. 21 vols. Rome: Il Calamo., etc. The common denominator of all those texts is that they deal with the subject of the origin of words, possibly in connection with that of the origin of human language. Linking the two issues, as I will briefly touch upon in §6, is far from the modern understanding of etymology qua scientific discipline: the latter is a subdiscipline of linguistics (i.e. the scientific study of language) concerned exclusively with the study of the origin of words or, more exactly, with “the search for the relationships — formal and semantic — that link a word with another unit that historically precedes it and from which it derives”.33.Zamboni (1976Zamboni, Alberto 1976 L’etimologia. Bologna: Zanichelli.Zamboni, Alberto 1976 L’etimologia. Bologna: Zanichelli.: 1): “la ricerca dei rapporti — formali e semantici — che legano una parola con un’altra unità che la precede storicamente e da cui quella deriva.” In some definitions, such as Malkiel’s (1957Malkiel, Yakov 1957 “A Tentative Typology of Etymological Studies”. International Journal of American Linguistics 23. 1–17. Malkiel, Yakov 1957 “A Tentative Typology of Etymological Studies”. International Journal of American Linguistics 231. 1–17. : 1–2), “the inquiry into the incipient phase of a given word history” is particularly highlighted as quintessential to etymology (also labelled by Malkiel in that context “lexical embryology”). Much rarer is the stance represented by Saussure (1922, Part III, Appendix C), who seems to place derivational morphology at the core of etymological research (see fn. 6). Yet, all along the history of Western culture, most of the discussions in those venerable texts go under the same label of “etymology” as modern and contemporary studies, which is unfortunate for terminological and conceptual clarity. Regrettably, this fact cannot be amended now, since the time to do this would have been when the research line mentioned in fn. 13 first arose, in the early 19th century, when all those involved instead went on using the old term etymology for what was indeed part of a new science, namely historical linguistics. It is essential to stress that the label etymology, contrary to, say, those of other disciplines such as “mathematics”, “physics” or “history”, covers cultural practices which are very far from each other, and most of them very far from linguistic science in our modern understanding, which does not by any means imply that the authors of those pre-modern texts were not good scholars — on the contrary, as we will see with some selected examples from Antiquity to the 18th century.44.Recognition of this distinction does not mean either that such texts, authors and cultural practices should not be considered a legitimate subject of research. On the contrary, it is right to consider them investigating “the cultural and historical embedding of these practices” (Sluiter 2015Sluiter, Ineke 2015 “Ancient Etymology: A Tool for Thinking”. Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship ed. by Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios, and Antonios Rengakos, 896–922. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Sluiter, Ineke 2015 “Ancient Etymology: A Tool for Thinking”. Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship ed. by Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios, and Antonios Rengakos, 896–922. Leiden & Boston: Brill. : 896). Simply, their work in etymology appears to us as a fascinating object of research in the history of human culture but as utterly orthogonal to (the history of) the discipline that we call etymology today, even though it addresses in part the same issues and problems and sometimes even proposes the same solutions (see §§5–6), a situation that is most effectively described with the formula “prescientific science”, the title of an influential monograph on Brahmanism (Oldenberg 1919Oldenberg, Hermann 1919 Vorwissenschaftliche Wissenschaft. Die Weltanschauung der Brāhmana-Texte. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht.Oldenberg, Hermann 1919 Vorwissenschaftliche Wissenschaft. Die Weltanschauung der Brāhmana-Texte. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht.).

2.2Continuity vs. discontinuity in the history of science

The picture is hence radically different from that, say, of mathematics, a field in which nobody would deny the Greek scholars Euclid (4th–3rd century bce) or Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287–212 bce), or the Italian Niccolò Fontana, nicknamed Tartaglia (1499/1500–1557), the status of a mathematician, owing to the sheer fact that they lived earlier than the 19th century.

A parallel will serve to illustrate the point. Imagine that a reader comes across an article published in a scientific journal, in the second half of the 20th century, under the title “Gravity and Love as Unifying Principles”, containing claims such as that “the law of love, […] the universal law controlling tendency toward union […] could apply as well to the inorganic world”, thus warranting a deeper understanding of gravity (O’Brien 1958O’Brien, James E. 1958 “Gravity and Love as Unifying Principles”. The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 21:2. 184–193. O’Brien, James E. 1958 “Gravity and Love as Unifying Principles”. The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 21:2. 184–193. : 185). This reader would be misguided if s/he considered this piece of writing to be an essay in physics, despite its revolving around the physical phenomenon of gravity (and at a time when scientific investigation thereof is long established).55.The list of bold statements in the article is long. Consider the following: “A prime source of Newton’s failure to realize that love could explain tendencies and motions in the physical world was his failure to realize the deep and extensive implications of the metaphysical position which affirms that everything which exists in the universe — every atom, every element, every compound — possesses goodness. It is the possession of goodness which makes each object desirable in some measure to other objects” (O’Brien 1958O’Brien, James E. 1958 “Gravity and Love as Unifying Principles”. The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 21:2. 184–193. O’Brien, James E. 1958 “Gravity and Love as Unifying Principles”. The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 21:2. 184–193. : 187). Rather, this is a paper in metaphysics, a branch of philosophy sometimes, as in this case, bordering upon religion, as shown by the fact that the article appeared in a journal called “The Thomist” after the name of the philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Now — and here comes the point of the comparison — the current usage of the label “etymology” employed to discuss texts such as Plato’s Cratylus or Yāska’s Nirukta (or the further ones all along the history of pre-modern etymology excerpted in Most et al. 2023Most, Glenn, Dagmar Schäfer & Michele Loporcaro 2023 “Part 2. Etymology: Introduction”. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in many tongues ed. by Glenn Most, Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 93–126. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Most, Glenn, Dagmar Schäfer & Michele Loporcaro 2023 “Part 2. Etymology: Introduction”. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in many tongues ed. by Glenn Most, Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 93–126. Leiden & Boston: Brill. : 107–226) is as odd as though one wanted to use “physics” as a disciplinary label to refer to O’Brien (1958)O’Brien, James E. 1958 “Gravity and Love as Unifying Principles”. The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 21:2. 184–193. O’Brien, James E. 1958 “Gravity and Love as Unifying Principles”. The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 21:2. 184–193. on a par with, say, Einstein’s (1915)Einstein, Albert 1915 “Zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie”. Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Gesamtsitzung vom 4. November, 778–786.Einstein, Albert 1915 “Zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie”. Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Gesamtsitzung vom 4. November, 778–786. seminal article “Zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie”. By contrast, nobody would doubt that Archimedes of Syracuse, despite living in the 3rd century bce, contributed significantly to the study of physics (as we conceive of it today), witness the principle of fluid mechanics that bears his name.

The case of etymology is a completely different matter, because ancient texts such as those mentioned in §2.1 are not instances of etymological study in the modern sense defined there (see fn. 3), but instead reflect cultural practices that intersect the domains of philosophy, religion and poetry, and that bear striking similarities to the linguistic behaviour of children and psychopathological patients rather than to the practice of today’s professional linguists (see §5).

Before proceeding, however, a further clarification is in order. I have selected so far very neat examples to exemplify unambiguous cases of continuity vs. discontinuity (e.g. Archimedes/Einstein vs. O’Brien for physics), but this is of course not to claim that the history of science consists entirely of such clear-cut cases as implied by such a dichotomy. Take, for instance, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), who is obviously part of the history of mathematics and cosmology and was a key figure in the scientific revolution of the 17th century along with Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. While his laws of planetary motion (1609–1619) subverted Ptolemaic heliocentrism, in his debut work, Mysterium cosmographicum (1596), an early defence of the emerging Copernican system, he begins the address in verse to the reader (Lector Amice Salve) preceding the dedication with the following questions: “Quid mundus, quae causa Deo, ratioque creandi, Unde Deo numeri” etc. “What is the world? What was God’s cause and reason for creation? Where did God get the numbers from?”, clearly not all research questions for cosmology in the modern sense (see Bucciantini 2003Bucciantini, Massimo 2003 Galileo e Keplero. Filosofia, cosmologia e teologia nell’Età della Riforma. Torino: Einaudi.Bucciantini, Massimo 2003 Galileo e Keplero. Filosofia, cosmologia e teologia nell’Età della Riforma. Torino: Einaudi.). These remarks on Kepler, already included in the original submission, respond to the objection by an anonymous reviewer, who rightly points out that, had I chosen an empirical discipline such as medicine, the contrast and discontinuity between ancient and modern would have appeared much less clear-cut. I take the point, and indeed, the comparison is stringent, particularly when it comes to the explanation of sound change, a crucial ingredient in etymology. This is made clear by Ohala’s (1989Ohala, John J. 1989 “Sound change is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation”. Language change. Contributions to the study of its causes ed. by L. Egil Breivik & Ernst Håkon Jahr, 173–198. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Ohala, John J. 1989 “Sound change is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation”. Language change. Contributions to the study of its causes ed. by L. Egil Breivik & Ernst Håkon Jahr, 173–198. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. : 174) famous statement according to which the explanation of sound change is not (and will never be) deductive-nomological, but rather consists in “identify[ing] those causes which are the pre-conditions for sound change”, which amounts to “treat[ing] sound change the way public health workers treat heart attacks”.

However, in the history of medicine, as far as I can tell, there is no single breakthrough comparable with the discovery of Grimm’s Law in historical linguistics that brought to the affirmation of what has come to be known as the historical-comparative method (on which see §3 below).

2.3A modest terminological proposal

When it comes to scientific terminology, polysemy is always unwelcome: therefore, on the analogy of Noam Chomsky’s (1986Chomsky, Noam 1986 Knowledge of Language. Its nature, origin, and use. New York: Praeger.Chomsky, Noam 1986 Knowledge of Language. Its nature, origin, and use. New York: Praeger.: 24–34) distinction between E-language (language as an external object) and I-Language (internalised language) — proposed as a means to disambiguate some of the many ways of conceiving of the phenomenon “language”, whose non-distinction created considerable confusion — I will henceforth distinguish “etymology₂” (i.e. the scientific discipline as defined in fn. 3) and “etymology₁” (i.e. all other cultural practices dealing with the origins of words and language[s]). The numerical indexes reflect historical sequence and are thus relatively unbiased. Furthermore, this convention has the advantage of labelling the two types of etymology symmetrically and without referring, for etymology₁, to any of the various historical or content-related aspects that the previous definitions brought into play.

Such previous definitions range from “ancient etymology” to “pre-” and/or “non-scientific etymology”, to “synchronic etymology”, to “rhetorical etymology”. The “synchronic” element in etymology₁ consists in its “connect[ing] a word with one or more others which are believed to elucidate its meaning” (Bronkhorst 2022Bronkhorst, Johannes 2022 “Synchronic Etymologising and Its Role in the Acquisition of Language”. Bhasha 1. 177–194. Bronkhorst, Johannes 2022 “Synchronic Etymologising and Its Role in the Acquisition of Language”. Bhasha 11. 177–194. : 178) and its “privileging semantic relations between coexisting lexical units rather than any laws of phonetic change governing the gradual succession of forms over time” (Most 2016Most, Glenn 2016 “Allegoresis and Etymology”. Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A global comparative approach ed. by Most, Glenn & Anthony Grafton, 52–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Most, Glenn 2016 “Allegoresis and Etymology”. Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A global comparative approach ed. by Most, Glenn & Anthony Grafton, 52–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : 65).66.Note that the label “synchronic etymology” is also used with an entirely different meaning in the field, to denote the elucidation of the origin of a complex word from a simple one of the same language through regular word-formation mechanisms, as in Saussure’s (1959de Saussure, Ferdinand 1959 Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally & Albert Reidlinger. In collaboration with Albert Reidlinger. Translated from the French by Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library [translated from Cours de linguistique générale, publié par Charles Bally et Albert Sechehaye. 2nd edition. Paris: Payot 1922].de Saussure, Ferdinand 1959 Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally & Albert Reidlinger. In collaboration with Albert Reidlinger. Translated from the French by Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library [translated from Cours de linguistique générale, publié par Charles Bally et Albert Sechehaye. 2nd edition. Paris: Payot 1922].: 189) example pommier “apple tree”, from pomme “apple”. Now, some (e.g. Belardi 2002Belardi, Walter 2002 L’etimologia nella storia della cultura occidentale. 2 vols. Rome: Il Calamo.Belardi, Walter 2002 L’etimologia nella storia della cultura occidentale. 21 vols. Rome: Il Calamo., vol. 1:454f.) exclude the investigation of this kind of lexical-morphological relationship from the realm of etymology, while Saussure dubs it “la partie la plus importante de la recherche étymologique” [“the most important part of etymological research”] (see discussion in Parenti 2017Parenti, Alessandro 2017 “Sull’etimologia di Ferdinand de Saussure e sull’etimologia in generale”. Ce qui nous est donné, ce sont les langues. Studi linguistici in onore di Maria Pia Marchese ed. by Monica Ballerini, Francesca Murano & Letizia Vezzosi, 293–307. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.Parenti, Alessandro 2017 “Sull’etimologia di Ferdinand de Saussure e sull’etimologia in generale”. Ce qui nous est donné, ce sont les langues. Studi linguistici in onore di Maria Pia Marchese ed. by Monica Ballerini, Francesca Murano & Letizia Vezzosi, 293–307. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.: 295, who flags the somewhat paradoxical nature of this statement by Saussure).

To refer to etymology₁, the label “rhetorical etymology” is also used (e.g. Frye 1950Frye, Northrop 1950 “Levels of Meaning in Literature”. The Kenyon Review 12:2. 246–262.Frye, Northrop 1950 “Levels of Meaning in Literature”. The Kenyon Review 12:2. 246–262., Renzi 2002Renzi, Lorenzo 2002 “Etimologia scientifica e etimologia retorica”. L’Accademia della Crusca per Giovanni Nencioni, 465–482. Florence: Le Lettere [repr. in Lorenzo Renzi, Le piccole strutture. Linguistica, poetica, letteratura, 45–64. Bologna: il Mulino].Renzi, Lorenzo 2002 “Etimologia scientifica e etimologia retorica”. L’Accademia della Crusca per Giovanni Nencioni, 465–482. Florence: Le Lettere [repr. in Lorenzo Renzi, Le piccole strutture. Linguistica, poetica, letteratura, 45–64. Bologna: il Mulino].). This label, at times, qualifies in the same context both, historically, texts from the Antiquity such as the Cratylus, as well as, meta-historically, “the verbal associations that underlie thinking” (Frye 1950Frye, Northrop 1950 “Levels of Meaning in Literature”. The Kenyon Review 12:2. 246–262.Frye, Northrop 1950 “Levels of Meaning in Literature”. The Kenyon Review 12:2. 246–262.: 255).77.Talking rhetoric and Antiquity, it can be mentioned that the author of the most influential ancient Roman treatise in rhetoric, Quintilian (ca. 35 — ca. 100 ce), aired contempt for the arbitrary method of etymology₁, through which, in his opinion, pravis ingeniis ad foedissima usque ludibria labuntur [“their perverse ingenuity causes them to fall into hideous absurdities” (vol. 1, p. 177)] (Quint. Inst. 1.6.32, transl. Russell 2001Russell, Donald A. ed. 2001  Quintilian, The orator’s education, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Russell, Donald A. ed. 2001 Quintilian, The orator’s education, vol. 11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.: 177).

Another terminology sometimes adopted contrasts “semantic etymology” (= etymology₁) vs. “etymology” tout court (= etymology₂), the former labelled after the preoccupation for the understanding of “true meaning” (on which we will comment in §5). The label was used by Bronkhorst (2001)Bronkhorst, Johannes 2001 “Etymology and Magic: Yāska’s Nirukta, Plato’s Cratylus, and the Riddle of Semantic Etymologies”. Numen 48:2. 147–203. Bronkhorst, Johannes 2001 “Etymology and Magic: Yāska’s Nirukta, Plato’s Cratylus, and the Riddle of Semantic Etymologies”. Numen 48:2. 147–203. , comparing ancient Indian culture with those of Ancient Greece and modern Europe, and has been quite successful.88.See e.g. El Masri (2020El Masri, Ghassan 2020 The Semantics of Qurʾanic Language: al-Āḫira. Leiden & Boston: Brill. El Masri, Ghassan 2020 The Semantics of Qurʾanic Language: al-Āḫira. Leiden & Boston: Brill. : 7–50) who contrasts semantic etymology (= etymology₁) in the Arabic tradition, with “historic(al)” etymology (= etymology₂). However, also within Arabic studies, Larcher (2006Larcher, Pierre 2006 “Derivation”. Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics ed. by Kees Versteegh, vol. 1, A-Ed, 573–579. Leiden & Boston: Brill.Larcher, Pierre 2006 “Derivation”. Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics ed. by Kees Versteegh, vol. 11, A-Ed, 573–579. Leiden & Boston: Brill.: 575) uses the label “historical etymology” to refer instead to etymology₁, and contrasts it with “diachronic” etymology (= etymology₂).

As is clear from the above, the “rhetorical”, “synchronic” and “semantic” aspects (in the senses relevant here) of etymology₁ are by no means peculiar to the Western tradition, but are, on the contrary, widely found in ancient cultures. Further cases in point are, for instance, the Babylonian creation myth, where the fifty names of Marduk (Böhl 1936–1937Böhl, Franz M. Th. 1936–1937 “Die fünfzig Namen des Marduk”. Archiv für Orientforschung 11. 191–218.Böhl, Franz M. Th. 1936–1937 “Die fünfzig Namen des Marduk”. Archiv für Orientforschung 111. 191–218.) convey attributes of the deity that originated as glosses on Sumerian names, or the explanations of names (or wordplay on them) provided by biblical authors (cf. e.g. Marks 1995Marks, Herbert 1995 “Biblical Naming and Poetic Etymology”. Journal of Biblical Literature 114:1. 21–42. Marks, Herbert 1995 “Biblical Naming and Poetic Etymology”. Journal of Biblical Literature 114:1. 21–42. ), such as the one on the name of Moses, whose origin, Semitic or Egyptian, is still debated to this day (cf. Schneider 2023Schneider, Thomas 2023 “Moses the Egyptian? A Reassessment of the Etymology of the Name “Moses”. “And in Length of Days Understanding” (Job 12:12). Essays on Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond in Honor of Thomas E. Levy ed. by Erez Ben-Yosef & Ian W. N. Jones, 1047–1056. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Schneider, Thomas 2023 “Moses the Egyptian? A Reassessment of the Etymology of the Name “Moses”. “And in Length of Days Understanding” (Job 12:12). Essays on Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond in Honor of Thomas E. Levy ed. by Erez Ben-Yosef & Ian W. N. Jones, 1047–1056. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. ). More generally, wordplay on names is documented in all cultures and testifies to a sensitivity to lexical relationships that also in ancient Greece long predates Plato’s Cratylus or Chrysippus’ Etymologiká. Examples include, in the 8th or 7th century bce, the wordplay on the name of Ulysses in the Odyssey (Odys(s)eús in Od. 19.407–409 from odýssomai “to hate”, and possibly also Oûtis “Nobody” in 9.366) or that on the name of Helen in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (458 bce), whose verses 681–690 contain a tríkōlon expanding on Helénē (heléna(u)s, hélandros, heléptolis) that implicitly derives the name, in saying that Helen of Troy was “true to her name”, from the root hel- “to destroy, exterminate”: “destroyer of ships, men, cities” (cf. e.g. Willi 2003Willi, Andreas 2003 The languages of Aristophanes: Aspects of linguistic variation in Classical Attic Greek. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.Willi, Andreas 2003 The languages of Aristophanes: Aspects of linguistic variation in Classical Attic Greek. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.: 97 n. 2).

I hope the discussion so far has made clear that a distinction is necessary and has indeed often been proposed, in the various ways now reviewed. The distinction helps avoid terminological confusion, which is anything but rare, as can be seen for instance in the quotation from Malkiel (1962Malkiel, Yakov 1962 “Etymology and General Linguistics”. WORD 18. 198–219. Malkiel, Yakov 1962 “Etymology and General Linguistics”. WORD 181. 198–219. : 200) reported at the outset (§1). The terminological convention adopted here brings out the fallacy of Malkiel’s statement, which violates topic continuity, for the embedded though-clause refers there to etymology₂, while it is obviously etymology₁ that “boasts a venerable history of its own”, distinct from and predating that of linguistics.

Examples could be easily multiplied, as seen e.g. in the following statement by Brückner (2006Brückner, Dominik 2006 “Historische Etymologien und Wortgeschichten in historischen Bedeutungswörterbüchern”. Lexicographica 22. 4–23. Brückner, Dominik 2006 “Historische Etymologien und Wortgeschichten in historischen Bedeutungswörterbüchern”. Lexicographica 221. 4–23. : 7): “Nun ist jedoch auch bekannt, dass die Etymologie bis ins 19. Jahrhundert hinein eine äußerst spekulative Wissenschaft war.” [“However, it is also well known that until the 19th century, etymology was an extremely speculative science”] (emphasis added, M.L.). Strictly speaking, this is contradictory, since what is/was “highly speculative” is etymology₁, i.e. not a “science” by our modern standards, which the author promptly recognizes in the immediately following passage: “Vieles an etymologischem Wissen, das in Umlauf war (und zum Teil weiterhin ist), entsprach nicht dem heutigen Wissensstand, ganz zu schweigen von der sprachhistorischen Realität” [“Much of the etymological knowledge that was in circulation (and still is, in part) did not correspond to today’s state of knowledge, not to mention the reality of linguistic history”].

Should the reader suspect that I am disingenuously picking out mere slips of the pen in the writing of fellow linguists, a few further quotations should convince them that this confusion is widespread, even in the most authoritative sources. Thus, Malkiel (1957Malkiel, Yakov 1957 “A Tentative Typology of Etymological Studies”. International Journal of American Linguistics 23. 1–17. Malkiel, Yakov 1957 “A Tentative Typology of Etymological Studies”. International Journal of American Linguistics 231. 1–17. : 2) lines up without distinction within a single historical profile to illustrate the difference between etymological dictionaries referring to a single language and comparative etymological dictionaries, works that actually differ in that the former belong to etymology₁ and the latter to etymology₂:

Monolingual dictionaries emphasizing etymology (e.g., S. de Covarrubias’s Tesoro for Spanish, 1611; G. Ménage’s Origines for French, 1650Ménage, Gilles 1650 Les origines de la langue françoise. Paris: Augustin Courbé.Ménage, Gilles 1650 Les origines de la langue françoise. Paris: Augustin Courbé. and 1694) precede by a wide margin multilingual, i.e., comparative, dictionaries, such as F. Bopp’s, for Indo-European (1847) and F. Diez’s, for Romance (1853).

Another statement that is very similar to Malkiel’s (1962Malkiel, Yakov 1962 “Etymology and General Linguistics”. WORD 18. 198–219. Malkiel, Yakov 1962 “Etymology and General Linguistics”. WORD 181. 198–219. : 200) cited in §1 is the following: “Etymology is a linguistic discipline dating from Ancient Greece.” (Blažek 2007Blažek, Václav 2007 “Etymology”. Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics ed. by Kees Versteegh, vol. 2, Eg-Lan, 65–69. Leiden & Boston: Brill.Blažek, Václav 2007 “Etymology”. Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics ed. by Kees Versteegh, vol. 21, Eg-Lan, 65–69. Leiden & Boston: Brill.: 65). While etymology₁ indeed dates from ancient Greece, etymology as “a linguistic discipline” (etymology₂) actually dates from early 19th century Europe. The fact that such blurring occurs in professional writings on etymology (this last article offers a respectable exercise in comparative Semitic etymology) attests to the urgent need for the notational and terminological distinction proposed here. It also testifies to the effectiveness of the use of numerical indexes, which allow one to disambiguate what are actually two distinct referents indicated by the same term,99.This usage is reminiscent of that of subscripts employed to disambiguate reference in syntax/semantics, as in Mary_i thinks that John_j loves her_i/k , where the subscripts i/k indicate respectively that the object of loving is either Mary or another (female) person. Kragh (1987Kragh, Helge 1987 An Introduction to the Historiography of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kragh, Helge 1987 An Introduction to the Historiography of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : 22) resorts to a similar expedient, distinguishing between Science₁ defined “as a collection of empirical and formal statements about nature, the theories and data that, at a given moment of time, comprised accepted scientific knowledge”, and Science₂, that “consists of the activities or behaviour of scientists”, independently of “whether or not this behaviour leads to true, objective knowledge about nature”. The rationale behind such a choice is the belief that a given polysemic term is now firmly established in common usage to convey all relevant meanings, to the extent that a proposal to reform its usage (by eliminating one of its meanings) would be doomed to failure. even in passages by outstanding linguists. This would obviously not be possible under the other terminologies mentioned above, which would require amending passages such as those now cited.

In what follows, I will survey the world history of etymology₁ and its relationship to etymology₂, touching upon several texts from different traditions across cultures. Before proceeding, however, a clarification is in order. Needless to say, I am not the first to argue that ancient etymology “has virtually nothing to do with our modern academic practice of etymology” and that one should “clear out of the way […] the possible confusion of ancient etymology and the modern form that has given us our etymological dictionaries” (Sluiter 2015Sluiter, Ineke 2015 “Ancient Etymology: A Tool for Thinking”. Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship ed. by Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios, and Antonios Rengakos, 896–922. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Sluiter, Ineke 2015 “Ancient Etymology: A Tool for Thinking”. Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship ed. by Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios, and Antonios Rengakos, 896–922. Leiden & Boston: Brill. : 897). Yet passages such as those now quoted by contemporary etymologists, in which the term etymology is used to refer simultaneously to ancient and modern practices, or in which Gilles Ménage (1613–1692) and Friedrich Diez (1794–1876) are cited within the same list as authors of “etymological dictionaries”, demonstrate that this exercise in terminological and conceptual clean-up is far from useless.

5.1The truth-seeking bias

As for the metaphysical quest for the hidden truth of things, this characterises the ancient Greek discussion in Plato’s Cratylus and other philosophers’ texts (Chrysippus, etc.), as well as the etymological speculations in the Indian Brāhmaṇas, which “were, for the Vedic thinkers, an important means of penetrating into the truth and reality lying behind the phenomena” since “[e]xplaining a name […] was a means of penetrating into the hitherto unknown nature of a person (or object), a means of acquiring control over him.” (Gonda 1955Gonda, Jan 1955 “The etymologies in the ancient Indian Brāhmaṇas”. Lingua 5. 61–86 [repr. in Jan Gonda, Reprint in Selected Studies. Volume 2. Sanskrit Word Studies, 32–57. Leiden: Brill 1975].Gonda, Jan 1955 “The etymologies in the ancient Indian Brāhmaṇas”. Lingua 51. 61–86 [repr. in Jan Gonda, Reprint in Selected Studies. Volume 21. Sanskrit Word Studies, 32–57. Leiden: Brill 19751].: 37 and 49). The same kind of assumptions about the truth of linguistic expressions underlies what Jean Piaget dubbed “le réalisme nominal chez l’enfant” (“nominal realism in the child ”), who “locates, until about 7–8 years of age, names in things believing that things have always had their names and that it was enough to look at things to see what they were called.”2424.“[I]l situe, jusque vers 7–8 ans, les noms dans les choses estimant que les choses ont toujours eu leur nom et qu’il a suffi de regarder les choses pour voir comment elles s’appelaient.” (Piaget 1925Piaget, Jean 1925 “La représentation du monde chez l’enfant”. Revue de théologie et de philosophie (Lausanne) 13. 191–214.Piaget, Jean 1925 “La représentation du monde chez l’enfant”. Revue de théologie et de philosophie (Lausanne) 131. 191–214.: 193). Similarly, schizophrenic patients are often reported to engage in “etymological₁” analysis whereby “the meaning is garnered by the patient from pieces of fragments of the word given a meaning in and of themselves” (Werner & Kaplan 1963Werner, Heinz & Bernard Kaplan 1963 Symbol Formation. An Organismic-Developmental Approach to Language and the Expression of Thought. New York, London & Sydney: John Wiley & Sons.Werner, Heinz & Bernard Kaplan 1963 Symbol Formation. An Organismic-Developmental Approach to Language and the Expression of Thought. New York, London & Sydney: John Wiley & Sons.: 260), along lines reminiscent of the procedures exemplified in all premodern texts, from Plato’s Cratylus to Hugutio’s Derivationes:2525.The latter a proto-dictionary composed in the late 12th century by Hugutio from Pisa, born around 1130 and appointed in 1190 bishop of Ferrara where he died in 1210 (cf. the critical edition by Cecchini et al. 2004Cecchini, Enzo, Guido Arbizzoni, Settimio Lanciotti, Giorgio Nonni, Maria Grazia Sassi & Alba Tontini eds. 2004  Uguccione da Pisa, Derivationes. Edizione critica princeps. Florence: Sismel Edizioni del Galluzzo.Cecchini, Enzo, Guido Arbizzoni, Settimio Lanciotti, Giorgio Nonni, Maria Grazia Sassi & Alba Tontini eds. 2004 Uguccione da Pisa, Derivationes. Edizione critica princeps. Florence: Sismel Edizioni del Galluzzo. and Loporcaro 2023Loporcaro, Michele 2023 “An Influential Latin Dictionary and Its Etymologies (12th Century ce) in the Linguistic Landscape of Medieval Europe. Hugutio of Pisa’s Derivationes”. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in many tongues ed. by Glenn Most, Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 212–226. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Loporcaro, Michele 2023 “An Influential Latin Dictionary and Its Etymologies (12th Century ce) in the Linguistic Landscape of Medieval Europe. Hugutio of Pisa’s Derivationes”. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in many tongues ed. by Glenn Most, Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 212–226. Leiden & Boston: Brill. ). thus, for one German patient, Schwester “sister” is equivalent to denholz (a nonce formation containing the word Holz “wood”) because it is “decomposed” into Schweden “Sweden” and Ster (a regional German wood measure name). Clearly, such procedures allow her to “often maintain multiple possibilities for a word that are equally significant to her, side by side.” (non-uniqueness).2626.“[D]aß die Kranke oft mehrere, für sie gleich bedeutsame Möglichkeiten für ein Wort nebeneinander aufrechterhält.” (Tuczek 1921Tuczek, Karl 1921 “Analyse einer Katatonikersprache”. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 72. 279–307. Tuczek, Karl 1921 “Analyse einer Katatonikersprache”. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 721. 279–307. : 299). Wolfson (1970)Wolfson, Louis 1970 Le Schizo et les langues. Paris: Gallimard.Wolfson, Louis 1970 Le Schizo et les langues. Paris: Gallimard. provides a “subjective” account of the etymological method of a schizophrenic, as was the author of the essay. (Thanks to reviewer #2 for pointing out this reference to me.)

Coming back from human behaviour at large to cultural and textual practices, the confidence that the name discloses some hidden truth is a feature that endures to this day in all modern manifestations of etymology₁ such as “philosophical” or “poetic” etymology, and whereas many modern practitioners and specialists of the latter are fully aware of the fact that their truth is “poetic” rather than scientific,2727.See e.g. Williams (2020)Williams, David-Antoine 2020 The Life of Words. Etymology and modern poetry. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, David-Antoine 2020 The Life of Words. Etymology and modern poetry. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. . this divide is often anything but clear in philosophical speculation (see e.g. Morpurgo Davies’s 1972Morpurgo Davies, Anna 1972 “Philosophical Etymology”. [Review of Kainz 1969.] The Classical Review 22:1. 74–75. Morpurgo Davies, Anna 1972 “Philosophical Etymology”. [Review of Kainz 1969.] The Classical Review 22:1. 74–75. critique of Kainz 1969Kainz, Friedrich 1969 “Philosophische Etymologie und historische Semantik”. Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse 262. 4. Wien: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf.Kainz, Friedrich 1969 “Philosophische Etymologie und historische Semantik”. Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse 262. 4. Wien: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf.). Indeed, it is not rare to come across distinguished contemporary philosophers who seriously propose “etymologies” (mis)using the word “science” in such contexts, as is famously the case for Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who, in his Foundations of Phenomenology, writes the following:

Plato macht einen Unterschied in der Art und Weise, wie für positive Wissenschaften, wie wir heute sagen, und wie für die Philosophie das Seiende, das ὄν, zugänglich ist. Das ὄν ist für positive Wissenschaften im Träumen zugänglich. Die Griechen haben dafür einen kurzen Ausdruck: ὄναρ. (Heidegger 1927Heidegger, Martin 1927 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Marburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1927 herausgegeben von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. In Heidegger, Martin 1975 Gesamtausgabe, Band 24. Frankfurt am M.: Klostermann.Heidegger, Martin 1927 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Marburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1927 herausgegeben von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. In Heidegger, Martin 1975 Gesamtausgabe, Band 241. Frankfurt am M.: Klostermann.: 74)

[“Plato makes a distinction between how positive sciences, as we call them today, and philosophy access to being, the ón. For positive sciences, the ón is accessible in dreams. The Greeks have a short expression for this: ónar”.]

Heidegger implies that ὄν “being” and ὄναρ “dream” are related, and that this reveals some truth, but in fact, the two words have nothing to do with each other, in terms of “positive science” (i.e. etymology₂).2828.On Heidegger’s etymologies cf. e.g. Gauger (1994)Gauger, Hans-Martin 1994 “Der etymologische Holzweg”. Park 18. 23–39 [repr. in Hans-Martin Gauger, Über Sprache und Stil, 62–81. München: Beck 1995].Gauger, Hans-Martin 1994 “Der etymologische Holzweg”. Park 181. 23–39 [repr. in Hans-Martin Gauger, Über Sprache und Stil, 62–81. München: Beck 19951]., Belardi (2002Belardi, Walter 2002 L’etimologia nella storia della cultura occidentale. 2 vols. Rome: Il Calamo.Belardi, Walter 2002 L’etimologia nella storia della cultura occidentale. 21 vols. Rome: Il Calamo., vol. 2:478), as well as Renzi (2002Renzi, Lorenzo 2002 “Etimologia scientifica e etimologia retorica”. L’Accademia della Crusca per Giovanni Nencioni, 465–482. Florence: Le Lettere [repr. in Lorenzo Renzi, Le piccole strutture. Linguistica, poetica, letteratura, 45–64. Bologna: il Mulino].Renzi, Lorenzo 2002 “Etimologia scientifica e etimologia retorica”. L’Accademia della Crusca per Giovanni Nencioni, 465–482. Florence: Le Lettere [repr. in Lorenzo Renzi, Le piccole strutture. Linguistica, poetica, letteratura, 45–64. Bologna: il Mulino].: 57–58) who, under the heading “Heidegger and his epigones”, discusses the “philosophical” etymologies by the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari highlighting his debt towards Giovanni Semerano, a polygraph author of several monographs (e.g. Semerano 1984Semerano, Giovanni 1984 Le origini della cultura europea. Rivelazioni della linguistica storica. In appendice: il messaggio etrusco. Florence: Olschki.Semerano, Giovanni 1984 Le origini della cultura europea. Rivelazioni della linguistica storica. In appendice: il messaggio etrusco. Florence: Olschki., that usurps the disciplinary label “historical linguistics” in its title), printed by otherwise respectable publishers, in which he argued, contrary to all commonly accepted scientific evidence, that Indo-European languages derive from Akkadian. So, Heidegger’s procedure does not significantly differ from that of the Brāhmaṇas, nor from that of millennia of etymological₁ speculation in between, reviving in particular the truth-seeking bias.2929.Note that scepticism towards “la possibilité d’une pareille étymologie” [“the possibility of such an etymology”, i.e. “philosophical etymology”] was aired as early as by August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1855) (Schlegel 1834Schlegel, August Wilhelm 1834 “De l’origine des Hindous”. Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom 2. 405–446 [repr. in Œuvres de Auguste-Guillaume de Schlegel écrites en français et publiées par Édouard Böcking. Tome troisième. Essais littéraires et critiques — Littérature orientale, 24–94. Leipzig: Librairie de Weidmann 1846].Schlegel, August Wilhelm 1834 “De l’origine des Hindous”. Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom 21. 405–446 [repr. in Œuvres de Auguste-Guillaume de Schlegel écrites en français et publiées par Édouard Böcking. Tome troisième. Essais littéraires et critiques — Littérature orientale, 24–94. Leipzig: Librairie de Weidmann 1846].: 59), the German polymath who operated in the founding era of comparative-historical linguistics to the building of which his younger brother Friedrich (1772–1829) actively contributed. In the European Latin Middle Ages (as exemplified e.g. in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae or Hugutio’s Derivationes), etymology was conceived of as revealing truth just as in contemporary India.

The truth-seeking bias may come also in a form that does not imply metaphysics. This is the case in the applications of etymology₁ in the realm of textual exegesis (often practiced on sacred texts) “as a way to negotiate and create meaning in commentarial praxis” (Tzohar 2023Tzohar, Roy 2023 “Buddhist Etymologies from First Millenium India and China: In the Works of Vasubandhu, Sthiramati, and Paramartha”. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in many tongues ed. by Glenn Most, Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 200–211. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Tzohar, Roy 2023 “Buddhist Etymologies from First Millenium India and China: In the Works of Vasubandhu, Sthiramati, and Paramartha”. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in many tongues ed. by Glenn Most, Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 200–211. Leiden & Boston: Brill. : 200, referring to Buddhist etymological glosses from the first half of the first millennium, ce). This quest for the meaning of a specific text, too, if it is not seeking for metaphysical truth, goes in search of a truth hidden behind the letter of the text, and may find many alternative ones.3030.A similar view is aired by Marks (1995Marks, Herbert 1995 “Biblical Naming and Poetic Etymology”. Journal of Biblical Literature 114:1. 21–42. Marks, Herbert 1995 “Biblical Naming and Poetic Etymology”. Journal of Biblical Literature 114:1. 21–42. : 24) about the etymologizing of the biblical authors, who according to him, rather than adhere to an essentialist or magical etymology₁, “seem … to exploit the myth of true meaning as a generic convention, subject to the most aggressive revision.” If seen this way, this practice is an instance of “rhetorical” etymology in the sense detailed in §§2.3 and 6. The divide between philosophical-metaphysical and commentarial practice is not easy to draw. Both are meaning-giving practices, and both seem to be involved when for instance Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975–1025 ce), the most important figure of Kashmir Shaivism, offers in his Tantrāloka (“light on Tantra” in Sanskrit) six different interpretations of the name of the Shaivite deity Bhairava (Sanskrit for “frightful”), one of which is “(Bhairava means) he who is manifest among those whose awareness is devoted to that trance which devours time, that is, in those who desiccate that essence of time which is the propellor of the celestial bodies”, an interpretation achieved by summoning (the meanings of) a series of Sanskrit words/roots which he sees in different segmentations of the name Bhairava (Kahrs 2001Kahrs, Eivind 2001 “Nirukta”. Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy ed. by Oliver Leaman, 386–389. London & New York: Routledge.Kahrs, Eivind 2001 “Nirukta”. Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy ed. by Oliver Leaman, 386–389. London & New York: Routledge.: 388).

5.2The non-uniqueness bias and the semantic bias

On the long road that led from etymology₁ to etymology₂, many ancient scholars were more advanced than Heidegger, as the truth-seeking bias soon ceases to play any real role in treatises by grammarians and language specialists such as Yāska or Varro, though in their writings both the non-uniqueness and the semantic bias are alive and well.3131.Cf. Bronkhorst (2023)Bronkhorst, Johannes 2023 “An Early post-Vedic Treatise on the Etymological Explanation of Words. Yāska, Etymology”. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in many tongues ed. by Glenn Most, Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 107–118. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Bronkhorst, Johannes 2023 “An Early post-Vedic Treatise on the Etymological Explanation of Words. Yāska, Etymology”. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in many tongues ed. by Glenn Most, Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 107–118. Leiden & Boston: Brill. . In this sense, Chantraine’s (1970Chantraine, Pierre 1970 “Étymologie historique et étymologie statique”. Bulletins de l’Académie Royale de Belgique. Bulletin de la Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques 56. 80–95. Chantraine, Pierre 1970 “Étymologie historique et étymologie statique”. Bulletins de l’Académie Royale de Belgique. Bulletin de la Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques 561. 80–95. : 88) statement on the rise of etymology₂ is not entirely accurate: “Avant eux [i.e., the scholars mentioned in fn. 13], l’étymologie consistait dans la recherche du sens intime, du sens profonde et essentiel des mots.” [“Before them, etymology consisted in the search for the intimate meaning, the deep and essential meaning of words.”]. Actually, this preoccupation was long gone for most grammarians as early as Varro (1st century bce), and was definitely not present in the least for, say, Gilles Ménage (see immediately below), whose etymological₁ speculation was nevertheless still affected by the remaining two biases. Both last indeed much longer, as is exemplified in the life work of the French poet and essayist Gilles Ménage (1613–1692).

Ménage produced book-length systematic etymological(₁) treatments of the lexica of French and Italian, which attest to an etymological procedure that, while addressing correspondences in form between the words at issue, clearly attributes privileges to semantics, as a guide for establishing etymological connections, that etymology₂ does not recognise. Or, to put it even more radically, “pour étayer son etymologie, il se base uniquement sur la signification qu’il croit plus stable que la forme phonétique.” [“to back up his etymology, he [Ménage, M.L.] relies solely on the meaning, which he believes to be more stable than the phonetic form”] (Baldinger 1959Baldinger, Kurt 1959 “L’étymologie, hier et aujourd’hui”. Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 11. 233–264 [repr. in Kurt Baldinger 1990 Die Faszination der Sprachwissenschaft. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zum 70. Geburtstag mit einer Bibliographie. Hrsg. von Georges Straka und Max Pfister, 40–73. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer]. Baldinger, Kurt 1959 “L’étymologie, hier et aujourd’hui”. Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 111. 233–264 [repr. in Kurt Baldinger 1990 Die Faszination der Sprachwissenschaft. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zum 70. Geburtstag mit einer Bibliographie. Hrsg. von Georges Straka und Max Pfister, 40–73. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer]. : 42).

As seen in the examples to be adduced shortly from Ménage’s work, formal connections between the subsequent steps in the derivation proposed do exist (and so Baldinger’s uniquement may be slightly overstated), but it is an incontestable truth that no correspondence in form whatsoever exists between the two extremes of the said derivations (e.g., It. ragazzo or Fr. laquais, on the one hand, and Lat. verna, on the other). All work in etymology₁ at all times has always proceeded in this manner, and examples are countless, from Lucius Aelius Stilo Praeconinus’s etymology of Latin vulpes ‘fox’ reported by his pupil Varro (Volpes, ut Aelius dicebat, quod volat pedibus “The uolpēs ‘fox’ got its name, as Aelius used to say, because it uolat ‘flies’ pedibus ‘with its feet’” LL 5.20, transl. de Melo 2019de Melo, Wolfgang David Cirilo ed. 2019  Varro: De Lingua Latina. Introduction, text, translation, and commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Melo, Wolfgang David Cirilo ed. 2019 Varro: De Lingua Latina. Introduction, text, translation, and commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. : 313–314) to Périon’s (1555Périon, Joachim 1555 Dialogorum de linguae gallicae origine ejusque cum graeca cognatione libri quatuor. Parisiis: Apud Sebastianum Nivellium, sub Ciconiis.Périon, Joachim 1555 Dialogorum de linguae gallicae origine ejusque cum graeca cognatione libri quatuor. Parisiis: Apud Sebastianum Nivellium, sub Ciconiis.: 75v) derivation of French maréchal “marshall” from Old Greek polémarchos “commander in chief” (see Droixhe 1978Droixhe, Daniel 1978 La linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600–1800). Genève: Droz.Droixhe, Daniel 1978 La linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600–1800). Genève: Droz.: 99). The link is exclusively semantic, as there is no relationship whatsoever between those proposed etyma and, respectively, PIE *(h)ulp–i- “cat, fox” (EDLEDL: de Vaan, Michiel 2008 Etymological dictionary of Latin. Leiden & Boston: Brill.EDL: de Vaan, Michiel 2008 Etymological dictionary of Latin. Leiden & Boston: Brill. 688; cp. Avestan raopi-, Latvian lapsa “fox”) and Old Franconian *marhskalk “horse attendant” (FEWFEW: von Wartburg, Walther 1928–2002 Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes. 25 vols. Bonn: Klopp, later Bâle: Zbinden Druck und Verlag [later editors: Otto Jänicke 1972–1978, Margaretha Hoffert 1976, Carl Theodor Gossen 1979–1983, Jean-Pierre Chambon 1986–1990, Jean-Paul Chauveau 1997].FEW: von Wartburg, Walther 1928–2002 Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes. 251 vols. Bonn: Klopp, later Bâle: Zbinden Druck und Verlag [later editors: Otto Jänicke 1972–1978, Margaretha Hoffert 1976, Carl Theodor Gossen 1979–1983, Jean-Pierre Chambon 1986–1990, Jean-Paul Chauveau 1997]. 16.517), which count as the respective etyma nowadays and are related to those two words not only semantically but also through regular sound change.

Ménage’s procedure can be exemplified by a handful of derivations involving French and Italian expressions meaning “service boy”, which are all traced back to Latin verna “slave”, most of them through a first attested step (the diminutive vernula), and all via the assumption of a host of additional intermediate steps, guided by the need to attain the final form but almost entirely lacking any independent motivation:3232.Ménage (1685Ménage, Gilles [Egidio Menagio] 1685 Le origini della lingua italiana compilate dal s.re Egidio Menagio, gentilhuomo francese. Colla giunta de’ modi di dire italiani, raccolti, e dichiarati dal medesimo. Geneva: Giovani [sic] Antonio Chouet [revised edition of Ménage (1669)].Ménage, Gilles [Egidio Menagio] 1685 Le origini della lingua italiana compilate dal s.re Egidio Menagio, gentilhuomo francese. Colla giunta de’ modi di dire italiani, raccolti, e dichiarati dal medesimo. Geneva: Giovani [sic] Antonio Chouet [revised edition of Ménage (1669)].: 245–246), s.v. garzone “servant, (service) boy”.

It. ragazzo < ragacius < racacius < lacacius < vernulacacius < vernula < verna;

It. garzone/ Fr. garçon < gartio, -onis < gartius < cartius < lacartius < lacartus < vernulacartus < vernulacarus < vernula < verna;

Fr. laquais < lacaius < vernulacaius < vernulacus < vernula < verna;

Fr. valet < varlet < verlettus < vernalettus < vernaculettus < vernaculus < vernacus < verna;

Fr. gars < gartius (and previous steps as for garçon)

This series is the result of decades of erudite research, nourished inter alia by the inclusion of materials on Italian stemming from the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, which had welcomed Ménage among its members in 1654.3333.This resulted in a controversy with the Accademia, since those materials were to have been included in the Academy’s Tuscan Etymological dictionary which was being planned under the direction of Carlo Roberto Dati (Zehnder 1939Zehnder, Joseph 1939 Les ‘Origini della Lingua Italiana’ de Gilles Ménage. Étude historique et critique. Paris: J. Flory.Zehnder, Joseph 1939 Les ‘Origini della Lingua Italiana’ de Gilles Ménage. Étude historique et critique. Paris: J. Flory.: 6–11). Nevertheless, Ménage’s work appeared in 1669Ménage, Gilles [Egidio Menagio] 1669 Le origini della lingua italiana compilate dal s.re Egidio Menagio. Parigi: Sebastiano Mabre-Cramoisi.Ménage, Gilles [Egidio Menagio] 1669 Le origini della lingua italiana compilate dal s.re Egidio Menagio. Parigi: Sebastiano Mabre-Cramoisi., even if with a pompous dedication “Agl’illustrissimi signori, e padroni miei colendissimi, i signori Accademici della Crusca” [“To the most illustrious gentlemen, and my most honourable masters, the gentlemen Academicians of the Crusca”] (see the dedication at the Accademia della Crusca website: <http://​193​.205​.158​.216​/fabitaliano2​/dizionari​/corpus​/schede​/0028976​.htm> [access: May 18, 2025]). Tellingly, at an earlier stage, while publishing in 1650 his work on French, Ménage (1650Ménage, Gilles 1650 Les origines de la langue françoise. Paris: Augustin Courbé.Ménage, Gilles 1650 Les origines de la langue françoise. Paris: Augustin Courbé.: 343) still admitted “Je ne sçay d’où vient gars.” [“I do not know where gars comes from”], but he finally reached the conclusion that this and the other words just mentioned must have come from Latin verna, obviously guided by similarity in meaning and adjusting the form in manifold ways, so as to reach the prospected outcome. As is readily apparent, the semantic bias (the fact of not basing one’s etymologies on form) is tightly related to the non-uniqueness bias, since from one and the same input form verna, one can arrive at the whole series of French words garçon, valet, and laquais.

As usual in etymology₁, non-uniqueness also applies in the other direction, as exemplified by Ménage’s (1650Ménage, Gilles 1650 Les origines de la langue françoise. Paris: Augustin Courbé.Ménage, Gilles 1650 Les origines de la langue françoise. Paris: Augustin Courbé.: 154) treatment of Fr. bru “daughter-in-law” (nowadays replaced by belle-fille in standard French, but persisting in regional/popular usage):

BRU. De nurus. Nurus, rurus, brurus, brusus, bru. On y a preposé un b, comme en bruit de rugitus, etc. Les Gascons disent encore apresent nore. Ou de l’Alleman bruyt qui signifie une espousée.

[“From nurus. Nurus, rurus, brurus, brusus, bru. A b- has been preposed, as in bruit “noise” from rugītus “(a kind of) noise”, etc. The Gascons still say nore at present. Or from German bruyt which means a married woman”]

In both directions, either following or reversing the time arrow, such etymologies “constitute a network rather than a one-to-one correspondence” (Bronkhorst 2001Bronkhorst, Johannes 2001 “Etymology and Magic: Yāska’s Nirukta, Plato’s Cratylus, and the Riddle of Semantic Etymologies”. Numen 48:2. 147–203. Bronkhorst, Johannes 2001 “Etymology and Magic: Yāska’s Nirukta, Plato’s Cratylus, and the Riddle of Semantic Etymologies”. Numen 48:2. 147–203. : 155). To be sure, alternative (or multiple) etymologies are discussed in today’s etymological₂ research too (see fn. 23), but they either point to secondary contamination of different words3434.See the hypothesis on the Latin deity’s name Līber mentioned in fn. 18. Another case in point is indeed Fr. bruit “noise”, which we still trace back, as Ménage, to Latin rugītus. However, in the absence of both independent motivation (from other regular correspondences) and phonetic plausibility (judged from the types of sound change that are known to occur in language after language), this relation is not established by postulating a change from r- to br- that may justify deriving directly bru from nurus. Rather, for this individual word, a crossing with synonyms with initial br- is currently assumed (FEWFEW: von Wartburg, Walther 1928–2002 Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes. 25 vols. Bonn: Klopp, later Bâle: Zbinden Druck und Verlag [later editors: Otto Jänicke 1972–1978, Margaretha Hoffert 1976, Carl Theodor Gossen 1979–1983, Jean-Pierre Chambon 1986–1990, Jean-Paul Chauveau 1997].FEW: von Wartburg, Walther 1928–2002 Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes. 251 vols. Bonn: Klopp, later Bâle: Zbinden Druck und Verlag [later editors: Otto Jänicke 1972–1978, Margaretha Hoffert 1976, Carl Theodor Gossen 1979–1983, Jean-Pierre Chambon 1986–1990, Jean-Paul Chauveau 1997]. 10.552), e.g. the root *brag- “scream” or Germanic *brammōn “yell”, both living on separately in Gallo-Romance (see FEWFEW: von Wartburg, Walther 1928–2002 Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes. 25 vols. Bonn: Klopp, later Bâle: Zbinden Druck und Verlag [later editors: Otto Jänicke 1972–1978, Margaretha Hoffert 1976, Carl Theodor Gossen 1979–1983, Jean-Pierre Chambon 1986–1990, Jean-Paul Chauveau 1997].FEW: von Wartburg, Walther 1928–2002 Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes. 251 vols. Bonn: Klopp, later Bâle: Zbinden Druck und Verlag [later editors: Otto Jänicke 1972–1978, Margaretha Hoffert 1976, Carl Theodor Gossen 1979–1983, Jean-Pierre Chambon 1986–1990, Jean-Paul Chauveau 1997]. 1.490 and 15.1.140). or are the symptom of a (still) imperfectly elucidated word history, along the path of that never-ending progress which Leo Spitzer once so synthesized:

die Etymologie stets nur relativ die beste und nur durch ein Näherungs- und Balanzierverfahren verbesserbar.

[“(an) etymology (is) always only relatively the best and can only be improved by an approximation and balancing procedure”].(Spitzer 1925Spitzer, Leo 1925 “Aus der Werkstatt des Etymologen”. Jahrbuch für Philologie 1. 129–159.Spitzer, Leo 1925 “Aus der Werkstatt des Etymologen”. Jahrbuch für Philologie 11. 129–159.: 158)

In his “balancing act”, Ménage, not unlike Varro (see the conclusion of §3), locally asked the right kind of questions, which one could paraphrase as, for instance, “how do I get initial br- in bru or ç — standing for Old French [ts] — in garçon?”. He made a serious effort to answer such questions systematically, as shown by the fact that his etymological dictionary of Italian opens with an inventory of what he regards as possible sound change, entitled “Delle parentele e amistà tra le lettere e del mutarsi che fanno d’una in altra” [“About the family relationships and friendships between the letters and the change they make from one to another”] (Ménage 1669Ménage, Gilles [Egidio Menagio] 1669 Le origini della lingua italiana compilate dal s.re Egidio Menagio. Parigi: Sebastiano Mabre-Cramoisi.Ménage, Gilles [Egidio Menagio] 1669 Le origini della lingua italiana compilate dal s.re Egidio Menagio. Parigi: Sebastiano Mabre-Cramoisi.: 1–67; 1685Ménage, Gilles [Egidio Menagio] 1685 Le origini della lingua italiana compilate dal s.re Egidio Menagio, gentilhuomo francese. Colla giunta de’ modi di dire italiani, raccolti, e dichiarati dal medesimo. Geneva: Giovani [sic] Antonio Chouet [revised edition of Ménage (1669)].Ménage, Gilles [Egidio Menagio] 1685 Le origini della lingua italiana compilate dal s.re Egidio Menagio, gentilhuomo francese. Colla giunta de’ modi di dire italiani, raccolti, e dichiarati dal medesimo. Geneva: Giovani [sic] Antonio Chouet [revised edition of Ménage (1669)].: 1–26). With these tools — which largely correspond to the etymological method of classical Antiquity described by Varro L.L. 5.6 (cf. de Melo 2019de Melo, Wolfgang David Cirilo ed. 2019  Varro: De Lingua Latina. Introduction, text, translation, and commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Melo, Wolfgang David Cirilo ed. 2019 Varro: De Lingua Latina. Introduction, text, translation, and commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. : 258) and systematise it — Ménage sought to answer his questions based on the best information he could gather, which fully deserves respect to this day (a respect visible in the assessment by masters of the discipline, such as Gröber 1904Gröber, Gustav 1904 Grundriss der romanischen Philologie. 2., verb. und verm. Aufl. Strassburg: Trübner. Gröber, Gustav 1904 Grundriss der romanischen Philologie. 21., verb. und verm. Aufl. Strassburg: Trübner. , vol. 1:26), just as in the case of Varro, discussed in §3.

Similar systematisations of possible sound changes useful for establishing etymology, again following Varro’s method, can also be found in later works, such as the prolegomena to his Glossarium Germanicum by Wachter (1737)Wachter, Johann Georg 1737 Glossarium Germanicum, Continens Origines & Antiquitates Totius Linguae Germanicae, Et Omnium Pene Vocabulorum, Vigentium Et Desitorum. Opus bipartitum et quinque indicibus instructum. Lipsiae: Gleditsch.Wachter, Johann Georg 1737 Glossarium Germanicum, Continens Origines & Antiquitates Totius Linguae Germanicae, Et Omnium Pene Vocabulorum, Vigentium Et Desitorum. Opus bipartitum et quinque indicibus instructum. Lipsiae: Gleditsch. (see Considine 2009Considine, John 2009 “« Les voyelles ne font rien, et les consonnes fort peu de chose ». On the history of Voltaire’s supposed comment on etymology”. Historiographia Linguistica 36. 181–189. Considine, John 2009 “« Les voyelles ne font rien, et les consonnes fort peu de chose ». On the history of Voltaire’s supposed comment on etymology”. Historiographia Linguistica 361. 181–189. : 187). Wachter addresses cognates which are recognised as such by modern standards, such as e.g. German lassen/Gothic lētan “to let/leave” and, widening the perspective to include other Indo-European branches, e.g. Greek khá(sk)ō/Latin hiō “to be wide open”, Greek damá(z)ō/Latin domō “to tame”. However, his commentary on these comparisons is that “A — Mutatur in omnes vocales propter affinitatem naturalem” [“/a/ changes into any vowel because of a natural affinity”] (Prolegomena, §III.IV). One fundamental part of the problem, here as elsewhere in etymology₁, is that at the time it had not yet been realised that sound change can be context-sensitive, something that was clarified definitively with Verner (1877)Verner, Karl 1877 “Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung”. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der Indogermanischen Sprachen 23. 97–130.Verner, Karl 1877 “Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung”. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der Indogermanischen Sprachen 231. 97–130. explaining apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law with the original position of stress in Proto-Indo-European.

More generally, Wachter’s etymologies and cross-linguistic comparisons of cognates, just as all premodern ones, are at times right, so to speak, largely by chance, as becomes clear as soon as one considers just a few more, such as those that he adduces to exemplify the (alleged) fact that “B. & P. permutantur” [“/b/ and /p/ change into each other”]:

βόσκω Lat. pasco […] buch liber Alam. puach […] brennen, bernen a πῦρ ignis.

[“Greek bóskō Lat. pascō ‘to feed’ … (High) German Buch ‘book’ Alemannic puach … German brennen ‘to burn’ from Greek pûr ‘fire’”].(Wachter 1737Wachter, Johann Georg 1737 Glossarium Germanicum, Continens Origines & Antiquitates Totius Linguae Germanicae, Et Omnium Pene Vocabulorum, Vigentium Et Desitorum. Opus bipartitum et quinque indicibus instructum. Lipsiae: Gleditsch.Wachter, Johann Georg 1737 Glossarium Germanicum, Continens Origines & Antiquitates Totius Linguae Germanicae, Et Omnium Pene Vocabulorum, Vigentium Et Desitorum. Opus bipartitum et quinque indicibus instructum. Lipsiae: Gleditsch.: 223)

While the correspondence within Germanic (with the markedly voiceless and fortis /p/- in the Alemannic word for “book”) is sound, Greek bóskō is possibly related to Latin bos “ox” (EDGEDG: Beekes, Robert 2010 Etymological dictionary of Greek. 2 vols. Leiden & Boston: Brill.EDG: Beekes, Robert 2010 Etymological dictionary of Greek. 21 vols. Leiden & Boston: Brill. 228), not to Lat. pascō which instead stems from the same root as Gk. poimḗn “shepherd” (EDLEDL: de Vaan, Michiel 2008 Etymological dictionary of Latin. Leiden & Boston: Brill.EDL: de Vaan, Michiel 2008 Etymological dictionary of Latin. Leiden & Boston: Brill. 449), and German brennen has nothing to do with Gk. pûr “fire” which actually is from the same root as English fire.

In the same year as Wachter’s (1737)Wachter, Johann Georg 1737 Glossarium Germanicum, Continens Origines & Antiquitates Totius Linguae Germanicae, Et Omnium Pene Vocabulorum, Vigentium Et Desitorum. Opus bipartitum et quinque indicibus instructum. Lipsiae: Gleditsch.Wachter, Johann Georg 1737 Glossarium Germanicum, Continens Origines & Antiquitates Totius Linguae Germanicae, Et Omnium Pene Vocabulorum, Vigentium Et Desitorum. Opus bipartitum et quinque indicibus instructum. Lipsiae: Gleditsch. Glossarium Germanicum, also Gregorio Mayans y Siscar’s (1699–1781) Origenes de la lengua española (1737) has several “modern” features, which render it closer to etymology₂ in some ways, such as the explicit rejection of the truth-seeking bias which emerges, for example, in the criticism of the explanation of the name of the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca offered by an anonymous 14th-century Latin biographical dictionary once attributed to the English philosopher Walter Burley:

Da ganas de reir lo que escrive Valter Burlei en el Libro De Vita et Moribus Philosophorum, donde hablando de Seneca dice que por cierto presagio se llamó Seneca, que quiere decir, Se necans. Graciosa Etimologia por cierto!

[“It makes one laugh what Walter Burley writes in his book De Vita et Moribus Philosophorum, where, speaking of Seneca, he says that by some strange omen, he was named Seneca, which means Se necans “killing himself”. A funny etymology indeed!”].(Mayans y Siscar 1737Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio 1737 Origenes de la lengua española. Compuestos por varios autores, recogidos por Don Gregorio Mayáns i Siscár, Bibliothecario del Rei Nuestro Señor. 2 vols. Madrid: Zuñiga.Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio 1737 Origenes de la lengua española. Compuestos por varios autores, recogidos por Don Gregorio Mayáns i Siscár, Bibliothecario del Rei Nuestro Señor. 21 vols. Madrid: Zuñiga., vol. 1:121)

Mayans y Siscar (1737Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio 1737 Origenes de la lengua española. Compuestos por varios autores, recogidos por Don Gregorio Mayáns i Siscár, Bibliothecario del Rei Nuestro Señor. 2 vols. Madrid: Zuñiga.Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio 1737 Origenes de la lengua española. Compuestos por varios autores, recogidos por Don Gregorio Mayáns i Siscár, Bibliothecario del Rei Nuestro Señor. 21 vols. Madrid: Zuñiga., vol. 1: 123), too, recognizes the importance of establishing “Canones, o Reglas Generales de las Letras que se suelen añadir, quitar, o mudar, en el Principio, Medio, o Fin de las Dicciones al passarlas de unas Lenguas en otras” [“canons, or general rules of the leters that may be added, subtracted or changed, at the beginning, middle or end of words as these pass from a language to another”]. Yet, his list includes a lot of “general rules” that involve promiscuously Spanish, Latin, Old Greek and other languages, such as “A, mudada en U” [“A changed into U”], as allegedly exemplified with “A Sensato, Sesudo” [“(Spanish) sesudo “prudent, sensible” comes from (the Latin synonym) sensatus”] (Mayans y Siscar 1737Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio 1737 Origenes de la lengua española. Compuestos por varios autores, recogidos por Don Gregorio Mayáns i Siscár, Bibliothecario del Rei Nuestro Señor. 2 vols. Madrid: Zuñiga.Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio 1737 Origenes de la lengua española. Compuestos por varios autores, recogidos por Don Gregorio Mayáns i Siscár, Bibliothecario del Rei Nuestro Señor. 21 vols. Madrid: Zuñiga., vol. 1:124). Although the root is indeed the same (from Latin sensus, “sense”), there is a suffix replacement here, while there has been no change at all of /a/ to /u/ from Latin to Spanish, either here or elsewhere.3535.It is difficult not to see the semantic bias at work here, since it is synonymy that determines the establishment of the alleged sound change, through the application of the same mechanism that Sluiter (2015Sluiter, Ineke 2015 “Ancient Etymology: A Tool for Thinking”. Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship ed. by Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios, and Antonios Rengakos, 896–922. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Sluiter, Ineke 2015 “Ancient Etymology: A Tool for Thinking”. Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship ed. by Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios, and Antonios Rengakos, 896–922. Leiden & Boston: Brill. : 897) ascribes to ancient etymology: “In antiquity, to the extent that rules are formulated, they are mostly ad hoc and as it were ‘after the fact’, the ‘fact’ being a preliminary semantic observation, leading to an interpretive relationship between the explanandum and the explanans.”

As said in §2, the most insightful formula to refer to the effort of scholars such as Varro, Ménage, Wachter or Mayans y Siscar is Oldenberg’s (1919)Oldenberg, Hermann 1919 Vorwissenschaftliche Wissenschaft. Die Weltanschauung der Brāhmana-Texte. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht.Oldenberg, Hermann 1919 Vorwissenschaftliche Wissenschaft. Die Weltanschauung der Brāhmana-Texte. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. Vorwissenschaftliche Wissenschaft [“prescientific science”], the title of a monograph on the Brāhmaṇas that recognises their status as scientific work, in terms of subject matter and the effort expended, even though the results cannot be considered scientific by modern standards. Indeed, it is my contention that the mere continuity of the object of research is not sufficient to guarantee continuity in the history of a scientific discipline: shamanism and ethnic religions of all kinds deal with physical phenomena (e.g. atmospheric phenomena, diseases, etc.), but we do not consider them an integral part of the history of meteorology or biology.

Thus, back to Ménage’s analysis of Fr. bru “daughter-in-law”, it is true that Gascons say instead nore “daughter-in-law” and that the latter comes from its Latin synonym nurus (or, more precisely, its late analogical Nebenform nora), but none is related to bru, which is indeed of Germanic descent, as rightly spotted by Ménage with his second guess:3636.Here, reviewer #1 raises a serious objection: “The example of Ménage’s “double” etymology of Fr. bru is misleading, since the same author in other entries is very aware of the uniqueness of etymological solutions (see for instance, in his Origini, the whole discussion on It. oca [“goose”], in which the reconstructions proposed by Castelvetro, Varchi and other authors are proven to be wrong — S’ingannano tutti quanti — and the correct solution auca is given, on the base of Late Latin records of the form)”. However, the point is not whether Ménage was well-informed and thorough — he certainly was — or whether, at times, he identified the right solution (or, more precisely, what we now consider to be such). The point is rather that he had no method for ruling out erroneous etymological solutions (whether multiple or not), such as Lat. nurus for Fr. bru “daughter-in-law”, because (a) his primary guide was semantics (just as in antiquity; see above, fn. 35 and, on Ménage, the quote from Baldinger 1959Baldinger, Kurt 1959 “L’étymologie, hier et aujourd’hui”. Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 11. 233–264 [repr. in Kurt Baldinger 1990 Die Faszination der Sprachwissenschaft. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zum 70. Geburtstag mit einer Bibliographie. Hrsg. von Georges Straka und Max Pfister, 40–73. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer]. Baldinger, Kurt 1959 “L’étymologie, hier et aujourd’hui”. Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 111. 233–264 [repr. in Kurt Baldinger 1990 Die Faszination der Sprachwissenschaft. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zum 70. Geburtstag mit einer Bibliographie. Hrsg. von Georges Straka und Max Pfister, 40–73. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer]. at the beginning of this section); and (b) his method for ascertaining sound correspondences lacked the rigour that was only achieved with the establishment of historical linguistics as a scientific discipline at the dawn of the 19th century. indeed, the Low German form cited (cp. Dutch bruid “bride”, vs. High German Braut) is a successor of Germanic *brūdi- “newlywed woman”, which was borrowed via Gothic brūþs into Late Latin as brūtis “daugther-in-law” (REWREW: Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm 1935 Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd edition. Heidelberg: Winter.REW: Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm 1935 Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd edition. Heidelberg: Winter. 1345), attested in inscriptions from the third century ce.3737.These stem from eastern Europe, where Goths were settled: e.g. Iul(ia) Marcella brutis in Brigetio, Pannonia superior, today’s Környe, Hungary (Kovács 2005Kovács, Péter 2005 Tituli Romani in Hungaria reperti. Budapest: Enciklopédia Kiadó.Kovács, Péter 2005 Tituli Romani in Hungaria reperti. Budapest: Enciklopédia Kiadó.: Nr. 111); further attestations from Noricum and Moesia superior and inferior (today’s Austria, Serbia, and Bulgaria) in CILCIL: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum Consilio et auctoritate Academiae Litterarum Regiae Borussicae, editum Berolini: apud Georgium Reimerum, MDCCCXCIII–.CIL: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum Consilio et auctoritate Academiae Litterarum Regiae Borussicae, editum Berolini: apud Georgium Reimerum, MDCCCXCIII–. 3.4746, 12377 and 12666 (see ThLLThLL: Thesaurus linguae Latinae. Editus auctoritate et consilio academiarum quinque Germanicarum Berolinensis Gottingensis Lipsiensis Monacensis Vindobonensis. Leipzig: Teubner 1900–.ThLL: Thesaurus linguae Latinae. Editus auctoritate et consilio academiarum quinque Germanicarum Berolinensis Gottingensis Lipsiensis Monacensis Vindobonensis. Leipzig: Teubner 1900–. 2.2212.7–11). Ménage had extensive knowledge of Gallo-Romance dialects, in the same way as the author of the modern reference Gallo-Romance etymological dictionary (see fn. 34 and 38), Walter von Wartburg (1888–1971), and he was acquainted with late Latin forms such as garcio, onis. However, the latter is a late disguise of the Romance form, first attested in late Middle Ages texts such as Hugutio’s Derivationes (garcio P 109.10; see Cecchini et al. 2004Cecchini, Enzo, Guido Arbizzoni, Settimio Lanciotti, Giorgio Nonni, Maria Grazia Sassi & Alba Tontini eds. 2004  Uguccione da Pisa, Derivationes. Edizione critica princeps. Florence: Sismel Edizioni del Galluzzo.Cecchini, Enzo, Guido Arbizzoni, Settimio Lanciotti, Giorgio Nonni, Maria Grazia Sassi & Alba Tontini eds. 2004 Uguccione da Pisa, Derivationes. Edizione critica princeps. Florence: Sismel Edizioni del Galluzzo., vol. 2:957 and Du CangeDu Cange: Du Cange, Charles [du Fresne] 1883–1887 Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis, 1610–1688. New edition, with supplements by P. Carpenter, ed. by G. A. L. Henschel. Niort: Favre.Du Cange: Du Cange, Charles [du Fresne] 1883–1887 Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis, 1610–1688. New edition, with supplements by P. Carpenter, ed. by G. A. L. Henschel. Niort: Favre. 4.29a), while varlet, invoked in the explanation of Fr. valet, is indeed an existing dialect form (in Dauphiné), etymologically related to Francien valet, but the two have nothing to do with Latin verna: rather, they come from medieval Latin *vassellittus (in its accusative form -um), a diminutive of the word for “vassal”.3838. FEWFEW: von Wartburg, Walther 1928–2002 Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes. 25 vols. Bonn: Klopp, later Bâle: Zbinden Druck und Verlag [later editors: Otto Jänicke 1972–1978, Margaretha Hoffert 1976, Carl Theodor Gossen 1979–1983, Jean-Pierre Chambon 1986–1990, Jean-Paul Chauveau 1997].FEW: von Wartburg, Walther 1928–2002 Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes. 251 vols. Bonn: Klopp, later Bâle: Zbinden Druck und Verlag [later editors: Otto Jänicke 1972–1978, Margaretha Hoffert 1976, Carl Theodor Gossen 1979–1983, Jean-Pierre Chambon 1986–1990, Jean-Paul Chauveau 1997]. 14.198. Vassallus is in turn a derivative from vassus “servant”, a word of Celtic origin (< Gaulish *wassos < Proto-Celtic *wastos “servant”, EDPCEDPC: Matasović, Ranko 2009 Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic. Leiden & Boston: Brill.EDPC: Matasović, Ranko 2009 Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic. Leiden & Boston: Brill. 404) attested in late Latin since the 7th century. In his earlier work on French, Ménage (1650Ménage, Gilles 1650 Les origines de la langue françoise. Paris: Augustin Courbé.Ménage, Gilles 1650 Les origines de la langue françoise. Paris: Augustin Courbé.: 645) proposed another etymology, tracing it back to Lat. baiulus “porter” (via an unattested form *baiulettus), again an example of one-to-many etymological correspondences.

If one now asks why the results of this life-long quest by a respectable scholar, interested in language per se, not sharing the truth-seeking bias and thoroughly informed on the relevant primary data (modern forms, from both the standard language and the dialects, as well as older ones), are nevertheless out of focus in our modern perspective, the answer is clear: he, as all his contemporaries and antecessors, despite all efforts (exemplified with Ménage’s 1685Ménage, Gilles [Egidio Menagio] 1685 Le origini della lingua italiana compilate dal s.re Egidio Menagio, gentilhuomo francese. Colla giunta de’ modi di dire italiani, raccolti, e dichiarati dal medesimo. Geneva: Giovani [sic] Antonio Chouet [revised edition of Ménage (1669)].Ménage, Gilles [Egidio Menagio] 1685 Le origini della lingua italiana compilate dal s.re Egidio Menagio, gentilhuomo francese. Colla giunta de’ modi di dire italiani, raccolti, e dichiarati dal medesimo. Geneva: Giovani [sic] Antonio Chouet [revised edition of Ménage (1669)].: 1–67 list of possible changes) fell victim to the non-uniqueness and semantic biases precisely because he lacked a method to appropriately constrain hypotheses with regard to the observed data based on correspondences of form. This is the method that was established in the early 19th century (see §3 and the references in fn. 13) and evolved, with the Neogrammarians, into the postulate of the regularity (or even unexceptionability) of sound laws, which Campanile (1987Campanile, Enrico 1987 “La ricostruzione linguistica e culturale”. Linguistica storica ed by. Romano Lazzeroni, 115–146. Roma: NIS.Campanile, Enrico 1987 “La ricostruzione linguistica e culturale”. Linguistica storica ed by. Romano Lazzeroni, 115–146. Roma: NIS.: 123) rightly qualifies as a[n indispensable] “working hypothesis”.

Therefore, while I am grateful to reviewer 1 for their numerous useful suggestions, I cannot subscribe to their statement that “the beginning of modern etymology (or etymology₂) might be anticipated to the Renaissance, at least for two reasons”, which are “the renunciation to puns and other techniques of “rhetoric” etymology (e.g. acronyms)” and “the invention of the etymological dictionary”. Of course, these were both instances of progress, but without the working hypothesis of regular sound laws, including context-sensitive (and not only context-free) ones, it would not have been possible to establish the method of etymology₂, that made it inconceivable to postulate diachronic changes such as Lat. sensatum > Sp. sesudo. Only when this method was established did etymology₂ left behind

la facilité qu’ont les lettres à se transformer les unes dans les autres, [qui] donne aux étymologistes une liberté illimitée de conjecturer, sans égard […] au son des voyelles, & presque sans égard aux consonnes mêmes.

[“The facility that letters have to transform themselves into each other, [which] gives etymologists an unlimited freedom to conjecture, without regard […] to the sound of vowels, & almost without regard to the consonants themselves”](Turgot 1756Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 1756 “Etymologie”. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonnée des sciences, des arts et des métiers ed. by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, vol. 6, 98–111. Paris: chez Briasson, David l’aîné, Le Breton, Durand.Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 1756 “Etymologie”. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonnée des sciences, des arts et des métiers ed. by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, vol. 61, 98–111. Paris: chez Briasson, David l’aîné, Le Breton, Durand.: 101)

according to the criticism levelled at etymology₁ by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in his entry “Etymologie” in the Encyclopédie.3939.On which see Rosiello (1987)Rosiello, Luigi 1987 “Turgot’s “Étymologie” and Modern Linguistics”. Speculative Grammar, Universal Grammar, Philosophical Analysis: Papers in the Philosophy of Language ed. by Dino Buzzetti & Maurizio Ferriani, 75–84. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rosiello, Luigi 1987 “Turgot’s “Étymologie” and Modern Linguistics”. Speculative Grammar, Universal Grammar, Philosophical Analysis: Papers in the Philosophy of Language ed. by Dino Buzzetti & Maurizio Ferriani, 75–84. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. . This critique is cited in Considine (2009Considine, John 2009 “« Les voyelles ne font rien, et les consonnes fort peu de chose ». On the history of Voltaire’s supposed comment on etymology”. Historiographia Linguistica 36. 181–189. Considine, John 2009 “« Les voyelles ne font rien, et les consonnes fort peu de chose ». On the history of Voltaire’s supposed comment on etymology”. Historiographia Linguistica 361. 181–189. : 186), who reconstructs the history of a mocking comment on etymology apocryphally attributed to Voltaire and traces its closest match to a passage from Court de Gébelin’s (1775Court de Gébelin, Antoine 1775 Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, considéré dans l’histoire naturelle de la parole, ou origine du langage et de l’écriture. Paris: Author.Court de Gébelin, Antoine 1775 Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, considéré dans l’histoire naturelle de la parole, ou origine du langage et de l’écriture. Paris: Author.: 47f.) Monde primitif. Among the “etymological principles” established by this scholar,

the sixth was that ‘Les voyelles ne sont rien dans la comparaison des mots’ [“Vowels are insignificant in word comparison”] and the seventh was that ‘Les Consonnes correspondantes ont été sans cesse substituées les unes aux autres, surtout celles du même organe’.

[“The corresponding consonants have been constantly substituted for one another, especially those articulated with the same organ”].”(Considine 2009Considine, John 2009 “« Les voyelles ne font rien, et les consonnes fort peu de chose ». On the history of Voltaire’s supposed comment on etymology”. Historiographia Linguistica 36. 181–189. Considine, John 2009 “« Les voyelles ne font rien, et les consonnes fort peu de chose ». On the history of Voltaire’s supposed comment on etymology”. Historiographia Linguistica 361. 181–189. : 185)