Durkin - ˜Theœ Oxford guide to etymology

The Oxford Guide to Etymology

For my parents

Philip Durkin

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP
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Philip Durkin 2009

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First published 2009

First published in paperback 2011

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As my day job I lead the team of specialist editors researching, writing, and revising etymologies for the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. As a result my first debt of gratitude must be to all of my colleagues, past and present, for their deep expertise, stimulating questions, and very good company, over (so far) fourteen years of highly enjoyable and rewarding collaborative research.

I am very grateful to the following people and institutions for kind invitations to give lectures and papers which drew extensively on draft chapters of this book: Derek Britton and the Institute for Historical Dialectology at the University of Edinburgh; Hans Sauer and the University of Munich; Ursula Lenker and the University of Eichsttt; Hans Sauer and Ursula Lenker and the Fifteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Munich, 2008. To the audiences at each of these papers I am grateful for many helpful suggestions and observations, and not least for confirming that there is an audience for a book of this sort.

I am enormously grateful to all of those who have commented on parts of this book in draft: Kathryn Allan, Joan Beal, Alan Durant, Anthea Fraser Gupta, Christian Kay, Peter McClure, Inge Milfull, Nicholas Sims-Williams; and to the following who were generous and brave enough to read drafts of the whole book: Anthony Esposito, Meg Laing, Roger Lass, Anna Morpurgo Davies, John Simpson, and Edmund Weiner. The book as it stands today has benefitted enormously from the keen eyes and still keener intellects of all of these people. Needless to say, all errors and omissions are to be laid, with complete justice, entirely and exclusively at my own door.

I am hugely grateful also to John Davey at OUP for his help, advice, and encouragement at every stage in the process of shaping, writing, and producing this book. Elmandi du Toit, Malcolm Todd, and Lesley Rhodes provided expert input on the production of the book.

I would also like to thank Kathryn Allan a second time, for putting up with me on the many days when even brimming pots of coffee were not enough to focus the mind and drive away irritation. And finally I would like to thank the dedicatees of this book for tolerating a childs at times rather obsessive interest in very old documents and even older words.

Etymologies appeal to people with a very wide variety of interests and intellectual backgrounds. A very few people, such as myself, spend most of their time researching etymologies. A slightly larger number do so very occasionally. Many, many more people look at etymologies, but have never researched any themselves. Some people will never even have thought of etymologies as things which need to be researched. Particularly when etymologies are encountered in the compressed form found in many dictionaries, they can seem to be a given, rather than the (often very tentative) results of extensive research.

This book is intended for anyone who has taken the important first step of realizing that etymologies are the result of research, and would like to discover something about the nature of that research, and the principles and methodologies which underlie it.

I have attempted to frame this book so that it is addressed most centrally to someone who has an interest in historical linguistics, the study of how languages change and develop over time. Etymology is a part of this wider field, and anyones understanding of etymology will be greatly enriched by at least some acquaintance with the broader concerns of the discipline as a whole. Readers who are entirely new to this field may find that they get much more out of this book if they read it in conjunction with one of the many excellent general textbook introductions to historical linguistics, such as Schendl (2001) or, in slightly greater depth, Millar (2007, which is a revised edition of Trask 1996) or Campbell (2004); for an excellent introduction to a wide variety of linguistic topics focussing on the vocabulary of English see Katamba (2005).

When deciding what to cover in this book and in how much detail, I have tried to pay particular attention to those areas which are important for etymology but which receive relatively little attention in most introductory books on historical linguistics. Nonetheless, I have also endeavoured to ensure that the book provides a balanced account of all aspects of etymology, especially for readers who are prepared to follow up references to fuller discussions of any topics which may be new or unfamiliar.

Most of my examples will be drawn from English, since this is the one language that any reader of this book will necessarily have some knowledge of. However, my aim has been to assume no particular knowledge about the history of the English language, beyond the explanations and further references given in the text. Drawing examples from the history of English also brings the advantage that I have in many cases been able to make use of very recent research for the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary with which I have been involved personally.

Access to a good etymological dictionary of English would be of great benefit to anyone reading this book. In particular, access to the full Oxford English Dictionary, especially in its online version (www.oed.com), would be of especial benefit, so that many examples given here in summary form can be pursued in greater detail. (The dictionary can be accessed online via most institutional libraries and many public libraries.)