End of ADS-L Digest - 17 Oct 1997 to 18 Oct 1997
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Subject: ADS-L Digest - 18 Oct 1997 to 19 Oct 1997
There are 8 messages totalling 282 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

 1. Etymology of _Hoosier_ (2)
 2. Charles Carson's email address
 3. mb..., nd..., ngg...
 4. Japanese Teens' Use of US English
 5. Warning! and a Request
 6. thank you . . . thank you (2)

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Date:  Sun, 19 Oct 1997 10:23:25 -0400
From:  "Dennis R. Preston" <preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]PILOT.MSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Etymology of _Hoosier_

Fred,

Gosh, there are so many examples of the process of folk-etymology becoming
the 'truth' that I am surprised to hear a request for one.

How about a really old one:

For I would guess nearly all speakers of English (with the exception of
those who have professional training in the history of the language), the
first morpheme in the compound 'hangnail' is the morpheme 'hang.' That is
the current, psycholinguistic, morphological truth. (It is not the
historical truth, of course; the 'hang' part of 'hangnail' is related to
'anxiety' or modern German 'Angst' and meant 'hurt-nail,' but since the
damn things also 'hang' there off your nail, the folk etymology makes so
much sense that it has supplied the current morphological truth.)

If Fred means that dismissing all such stories would be a fairly safe bet
in determining the historical fact, I would (with a few hedges) probably
agree; if he means to dismiss folk etymology as a part of the historical
process of language change (in which the misunderstandings of one era
become the psycholinguistic facts of the next), that would be a serious
error. In fact, it would be no more sophisticated than one's being told
that a word does not 'have' a certain sense if it cannot be found in a
dictionary, or, more aptly parallel to this discussion, that a word
'really' means something because its historical meaning is thus and so. We
all know why words 'really' mean something (and why constructions,
pronunciations, etc... exist).

Dennis





>On Thu, 16 Oct 1997, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>
>> There is also some caution to be taken in lessons learned from medicine and
>> other areas (which we all pray are dominated by hard science) where folk
>> facts have tuned out to be right on.
>
>I would be curious to learn of examples of folk-etymologies that have
>turned out to be "right on." I have long believed that the more colorful
>an etymological story is, the less likely it is to have anything to do
>with the truth. If one automatically dismissed all colorful etymological
>stories as hogwash, one would rarely be in error.
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Fred R. Shapiro               Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
> Associate Librarian for Public Services   TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
>  and Lecturer in Legal Research      ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
> Yale Law School               Oxford University Press, 1997
> e-mail: fred.shapiro[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]yale.edu        ISBN 0-19-509547-2
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736