Ask the Box

10 jul 06

The definition of "etymology" from Dictionary.com is as follows:

The origin and historical development of a linguistic form as shown by determining its basic elements, earliest known use, and changes in form and meaning, tracing its transmission from one language to another, identifying its cognates in other languages, and reconstructing its ancestral form where possible.

The same website provides as an etymology of the word "etymology":

"Middle English etimologie, from Old French ethimologie, from Medieval Latin ethimologia, from Latin etymologia, from Greek etumologi : etumon, true sense of a word; see etymon + -logi, -logy."

In essence, it traces multiple historical sources for our modern English word, separates the root "etymon" from those sources, yet provides no origin for that root.

What does it mean about modern linguistics when we do not know the source of the word that is used to describe the source of all words? What does it mean more broadly about the semantics of the words we use? Is our language built on a house of cards? Will the universe stop expanding and begin its contraction once we track down the "source of sources?"

the reason "etymon" doesn't have a known root isn't because it's the source of All That Is, but only because history, ie, written history, only goes back so far; people have been around and talking for longer than that. i remember a really great scene from the movie "black robe", which is about jesuits among the iroquois in 17th century quebec, in which a missionary demonstrated writing for a pre-literate native. i'll have to paraphrase it:

iroquois: what is "writing"?
jesuit 1: tell me something that 'jesuit 2', standing over there and out of earshot, doesn't know.
iroquois: my grandfather fell through the ice last winter and drowned.
('jesuit 1' writes this down, and walks over to 'jesuit 2'. the iroquois follows. 'jesuit 1' hands 'jesuit 2' what he has written.)
jesuit 2: (looking down and reading out loud) last winter, the iroquois's grandfather fell through the ice and drowned to death.
(the iroqouis is horrified and shocked, as if by magic. his eyes go wide, and he grabs the paper and stares at it, in some combination of fear and reverence).

can you imagine what a person with no concept of writing must go through when he sees it used for the first time?

at first i thought what follows was just an aside, but after reading it i think it's related to this discussion ("the unmoved mover", "the source of sources", "the creator", etc, = "god", within a religious world-view). i looked up "black robe" on imdb.com to see if i could get the above quote verbatim, and i found another good one:

Daniel: They have an afterworld of their own.
Father Laforgue: They have no concept of one.
Daniel: Annuka told me they believe that in the forest at night the dead can see. The souls of men hunt the souls of animals.
Father Laforgue: Is that what she told you? It is childish, Daniel.
Daniel: Is it harder to believe in than Paradise where we all sit on clouds and look at God?

i like that the asker has extrapolated a cosmological theory from all of this, but i think it's based on a faulty analysis of language. if you trace a word back to its source-words' inceptions, then the consensus (this is prehistory we're dealing with here) is that they're based on immitating sounds (trivial example: "woof" for a dog's barking), or just the ensuing frustrated grunts when pointing to something -- "here is the refferent! now how do i talk about this referent?" the usefullness of signifiers was, i'm sure, quickly realized, and these grunts started to take on different, perhaps arbitrarily different, sound-forms. now, you could talk about a mammoth and a cave without them being in front of you.

the source of sources -- who created the creator? this is linear thinking, and the west is sort of locked into it. buddha said "no beginning can be perceived", even though i'm not one of those buddha-can-say-no-wrong new-agers. an example i've used for illustrating the lack of necessity of a "source of sources" is in mathematical constructs like infinite series -- some of these go on forever in both directions, and we don't have any problem working with them and integrating them into other mathematical objects.

i need to remind myself of that final component question:

Will the universe stop expanding and begin its contraction once we track down the "source of sources?"

turns out i end up covering that in another question, submitted by the same person. 0000057.html, i believe. go forth.