Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1993, Page 107

Learned & Popular Etymology
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Mr Taylor’s delightfully naive concept of “etymonic necessity” (1850:
128; see “Etymonic” in OED2), by which he means the authority
of etymological lineage, takes on a special poignancy in view of his
occasional philological fantasies, some worthy of the Cratylus. The
word field, for instance, is a patch of open ground “from which the
trees have been fell’d" (120).
This attitude (hopefully minus the blunders) still obtained when the
twelve-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in
1933, essentially a re-issue of the New English Dictionary on Historic
Principles 1884—1928. The 20-volume 1989 Second Edition of the
Oxfiord English Dictionary (OED2), in spite of the splendours of its
computer technology, is really no more than an “amalgamation” (the
term is used in the Preface) of all earlier versions and supplements.
Thus the etymological information in OED2 is couched almost en-
tirely in the original 19th-century wording, in spite of the fact that an
awareness of the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive lin-
guistics has been explicit since the nineteen-thirties and implicit at least
since the teachings of Saussure at the beginning of the century. When
surface reflection in the guise of Bloomfield’s “popular etymology” is
evident in the development of a word, OED2, like its predecessors,
frequently expresses a measure of disapproval. Here are two examples
(the wording is unchanged from the 1933 edition):
(4) Equerry... The surviving English form is due to an erroneous
idea of some connexion with L. equus horse; the accentua-
tion on the first syll., favoured by most Dicts. of the present
century, is due to the same cause
(5) Pickaxe... ME.pikoys,picois, a. OE picois pickaxe (llth c.),
med. L. picosi-um ... The later form arose confounding the
suffix with axe sb. Pickis, peckis survive in s.w. dial.
4.1 The “real meaning” ofwords
Seen from a hopefully less pre-scribed point of view these formula-
tions introduce at least two misconceptions. In the first place a factor
which has a radical effect on the development of a lexical item cannot