Etymology (A Linguistic Window onto the History of Ideas)
Joshua T. Katz (Princeton University)
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: June (2008)
Abstract
In the first decades of the seventh century CE, Isidore, Bishop of Seville, compiled a 20-book work in Latin called Etymologiae sive origines (“Etymologies or Origins”). Our knowledge of ancient and early medieval thought owes an enormous amount to this encyclopedia, a reflective catalogue of received wisdom, which the authors of the only complete translation into English introduce as “arguably the most influential book, after the Bible, in the learned world of the Latin West for nearly a thousand years” (Barney et al., 3). These days, of course, Isidore and his “Etymologies” are anything but household names—the translation dates only from 2006 and the heading of the wikipedia entry “Etymology” warns, “Not to be confused with Entomology, the scientific study of insects”—but the Vatican is reportedly considering naming Isidore Patron Saint of the Internet, which should make him and his greatest scholarly achievement known, if but dimly, to pretty much everyone.
People today are liable to confuse “etymology” with “entomology” because the words look and sound similar and, furthermore, because neither is so common, or describes so widespread a pursuit, as to be part of semantically transparent everyday discourse. Isidore himself would not have mixed them up: he knew Greek and understood that his subject was not “the study [-logy] of insects [entomo-]” but instead “the study of truth [etymo-]”—or, as he puts it, “the origin of words, when the force of a verb or a noun is inferred through interpretation” (1.29.1; trans. Barney et al., 54). But it is not out of the question that he would nevertheless have believed them to be connected: perhaps there are bees in the ABC’s?
Joshua T. Katz (Princeton University)
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: June (2008)
Abstract
In the first decades of the seventh century CE, Isidore, Bishop of Seville, compiled a 20-book work in Latin called Etymologiae sive origines (“Etymologies or Origins”). Our knowledge of ancient and early medieval thought owes an enormous amount to this encyclopedia, a reflective catalogue of received wisdom, which the authors of the only complete translation into English introduce as “arguably the most influential book, after the Bible, in the learned world of the Latin West for nearly a thousand years” (Barney et al., 3). These days, of course, Isidore and his “Etymologies” are anything but household names—the translation dates only from 2006 and the heading of the wikipedia entry “Etymology” warns, “Not to be confused with Entomology, the scientific study of insects”—but the Vatican is reportedly considering naming Isidore Patron Saint of the Internet, which should make him and his greatest scholarly achievement known, if but dimly, to pretty much everyone.
People today are liable to confuse “etymology” with “entomology” because the words look and sound similar and, furthermore, because neither is so common, or describes so widespread a pursuit, as to be part of semantically transparent everyday discourse. Isidore himself would not have mixed them up: he knew Greek and understood that his subject was not “the study [-logy] of insects [entomo-]” but instead “the study of truth [etymo-]”—or, as he puts it, “the origin of words, when the force of a verb or a noun is inferred through interpretation” (1.29.1; trans. Barney et al., 54). But it is not out of the question that he would nevertheless have believed them to be connected: perhaps there are bees in the ABC’s?
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