Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

CHAPTER XVI
ETYMOLOGY

XVI.—§ 1. Achievements.

Few things have been more often quoted in works on linguistics than Voltaire’s mot that in etymology vowels count for nothing and consonants for very little. But it is now said just as often that the satire might be justly levelled at the pseudo-scientific etymology of the eighteenth century, but has no application to our own times, in which etymology knows how to deal with both vowels and consonants, and—it should be added, though it is often forgotten—with the meanings of words. One often comes across outbursts of joy and pride in the achievements of modern etymological science, like the following, which is quoted here instar omnium: “Nowadays etymology has got past the period of more or less ‘happy thoughts’ (glücklichen einfälle) and has developed into a science in which, exactly as in any other science, serious persevering work must lead to reliable results” (H. Schröder, Ablautstudien, 1910, X; cf. above, Max Müller and Whitney, p. 89).

There is no denying that much has been achieved, but it is equally true that a skeptical mind cannot fail to be struck with the uncertainty of many proposed explanations: very often scholars have not got beyond ‘happy thoughts,’ many of which have not even been happy enough to have been accepted by anybody except their first perpetrators. From English alone, which for twelve hundred years has had an abundant written literature, and which has been studied by many eminent linguists, who have had many sister-languages with which to compare it, it would be an easy matter to compile a long list of words, well-known words of everyday occurrence, which etymologists have had to give up as beyond their powers of solution (fit, put, pull, cut, rouse, pun, fun, job). And equally perplexing are many words now current all over Europe, some of them comparatively recent and yet completely enigmatic: race, baron, baroque, rococo, zinc.

XVI.—§ 2. Doubtful Cases.

Or let us take a word of that class which forms the staple subject of etymological disquisitions, one in which the semantic side is literally as clear as sunshine, namely the word for ‘sun.’ Here we have, among others, the following forms: (1) sun, OE. sunne, Goth. sunno; (2) Dan., Lat. sol, Goth. sauil, Gr. hḗlios; (3) OE. sigel, sægl, Goth. sugil; (4) OSlav. slǔnǐce, Russ. solnce (now with mute l). That these forms are related cannot be doubted, but their mutual relation, and their relation to Gr. selḗnē, which means ‘moon,’ and to OE. swegel ‘sky,’ have never been cleared up. Holthausen derives sunno from the verb sinnan ‘go’ and OE. sigel from the verb sigan ‘descend, go down’—but is it really probable that our ancestors should have thought of the sun primarily as the one that goes, or that sets? The word south (orig. *sunþ; the n as in OHG. sund is still kept in Dan. sønden) is generally explained as connected with sun, and the meaning ‘sunny side’ is perfectly natural; but now H. Schröder thinks that it is derived from a word meaning ‘right’ (OE. swiðre, orig. ‘stronger,’ a comparative of the adj. found in G. geschwind), and he says that the south is to the right when you look at the sun at sunrise—which is perfectly true, but why should people have thought of the south as being to the right when they wanted to speak of it in the afternoon or evening?

Let me take one more example to show that our present methods, or perhaps our present data, sometimes leave us completely in the lurch with regard to the most ordinary words. We have a series of words which may all, without any formal difficulties, be referred to a root-form seqw-. Their significations are, respectively—

Now, are these four groups ‘etymologically identical’? Opinions differ widely, as may be seen from C. D. Buck, “Words of Speaking and Saying” (Am. Journ. of Philol. 36. 128, 1915). They may be thus tabulated, a comma meaning supposed identity and a dash the opposite:

For the transition in meaning from ‘see’ to ‘say’ we are referred to such words as observe, notice, G. bemerkung, while in G. anweisen, and still more in Lat. dico, there is a similar transition from ‘show’ to ‘say.’ Wood derives the signification ‘follow’ from ‘point out,’ through ‘show, guide, attend.’ With regard to the relation between 3 and 4, it has often been said that to see is to follow with the eyes. In short, it is possible, if you take some little pains, to discover notional ties between all four groups which may not be so very much looser than those between other words which everybody thinks related. And yet? I cannot see that the knowledge we have at present enables us, or can enable us, to do more than leave the mutual relation of these groups an open question. One man’s guess is just as good as another’s, or one man’s yes as another man’s no—if the connexion of these words is ‘science,’ it is, if I may borrow an expression from the old archæologist Samuel Pegge, scientia ad libitum. Personal predilection and individual taste have not been ousted from etymological research to the extent many scholars would have us believe.

Or we may perhaps say that among the etymologies found in dictionaries and linguistic journals some are solid and firm as rocks, but others are liquid and fluctuate like the sea; and finally not a few are in a gaseous state and blow here and there as the wind listeth. Some of them are no better than poisonous gases, from which may Heaven preserve us![74]

XVI.—§ 3. Facts, not Fancies.

As early as 1867 Michel Bréal, in an excellent article (reprinted in M 267 ff.), called attention to the dangers resulting from the general tendency of comparative linguists to “jump intermediate steps in order at once to mount to the earliest stages of the language,” but his warning has not taken effect, so that etymologists in dealing with a word found only in comparatively recent times will often try to reconstruct what might have been its Proto-Aryan form and compare that with some word found in some other language. Thus, Falk and Torp refer G. krieg to an Aryan primitive form *grêigho-, *grîgho-, which is compared with Irish bríg ‘force.’ But the German word is not found in use till the middle period; it is peculiar to German and unknown in related languages (for the Scandinavian and probably also the Dutch words are later loans from Germany). These writers do not take into account how improbable it is that such a word, if it were really an old traditional word for this fundamental idea, should never once have been recorded in any of the old documents of the whole of our family of languages. What should we think of the man who would refer boche, the French nickname for ‘German’ which became current in 1914, and before that time had only been used for a few years and known to a few people only, to a Proto-Aryan root-form? Yet the method in both cases is identical; it presupposes what no one can guarantee, that the words in question are of those which trot along the royal road of language for century after century without a single side-jump, semantic or phonetic. Such words are the favourites of linguists because they have always behaved themselves since the days of Noah; but others are full of the most unexpected pranks, which no scientific ingenuity can discover if we do not happen to know the historical facts. Think of grog, for example. Admiral Vernon, known to sailors by the nickname of “Old Grog” because he wore a cloak of grogram (this, by the way, from Fr. gros grain), in 1740 ordered a mixture of rum and water to be served out instead of pure rum, and the name was transferred from the person to the drink. If it be objected that such leaps are found only in slang, the answer is that slang words very often become recognized after some time, and who knows but that may have been the case with krieg just as well as with many a recent word?

At any rate, facts weigh more than fancies, and whoever wants to establish the etymology of a word must first ascertain all the historical facts available with regard to the place and time of its rise, its earliest signification and syntactic construction, its diffusion, the synonyms it has ousted, etc. Thus, and thus only, can he hope to rise above loose conjectures. Here the great historical dictionaries, above all the Oxford New English Dictionary, render invaluable service. And let me mention one model article outside these dictionaries, in which Hermann Möller has in my opinion given a satisfactory solution of the riddle of G. ganz: he explains it as a loan from Slav konǐcǐ ‘end,’ used especially adverbially (perhaps with a preposition in the form v-konec or v-konc) ‘to the end, completely’; Slav c = G. z, Slav k pronounced essentially as South G. g; the gradual spreading and various significations and derived forms are accounted for with very great learning (Zs. f. D. Alt. 36. 326 ff.). It is curious that this article should have been generally overlooked or neglected, though the writer seems to have met all the legitimate requirements of a scientific etymology.

XVI.—§ 4. Hope.

I have endeavoured to fulfil these requirements in the new explanation I have given of the word hope (Dan. håbe, Swed. hoppas, G. hoffen), now used in all Gothonic tongues in exactly the same signification. Etymologists are at variance about this word. Kluge connects it with the OE. noun hyht, and from that form infers that Gothonic *hopôn stands for *huqôn, from an Aryan root kug; he says that a connexion with Lat. cupio is scarcely possible. Walde likewise rejects connexion between cupio and either hope or Goth. hugjan. To Falk and Torp hope has probably nothing to do with hyht, but probably with cupio, which is derived from a root *kup = kvap, found in Lat. vapor ‘steam,’ and with a secondary form *kub, in hope, and *kvab in Goth. af-hwapjan ‘choke’—a wonderful medley of significations. H. Möller (Indoeur.-Semit. sammenlignende Glossar. 63), in accordance with his usual method, establishes an Aryo-Semitic root *k̑-u̯-, meaning ‘ardere’ and transferred to ‘ardere amore, cupiditate, desiderio,’ the root being extended with b-: p- in hope and cupio, with gh- in Goth. hugs, and with g̑- in OE. hyht. Surely a typical example of the perplexity of our etymologists, who disagree in everything except just in the one thing which seems to me extremely doubtful, that hope with the present spiritual signification goes back to common Aryan. Now, what are the real facts of the matter? Simply these, that the word hope turns up at a comparatively late date in historical times at one particular spot, and from there it gradually spreads to the neighbouring countries. In Denmark (håb, håbe) and in Sweden (hopp, hoppas) it is first found late in the Middle Ages as a religious loan from Low German hope, hopen. High German hoffen is found very rarely about 1150, but does not become common till a hundred years later; it is undoubtedly taken (with sound substitution) from Low German and moves in Germany from north to south. Old Saxon has the subst. tō-hopa, which has probably come from OE., where we have the same form for the subst., tō-hopa. This is pretty common in religious prose, but in poetry it is found only once (Boet.)—a certain indication that the word is recent. The subst. without tō is comparatively late (Ælfric, ab. 1000). The verb is found in rare instances about a hundred years earlier, but does not become common till later. Now, it is important to notice that the verb in the old period never takes a direct object, but is always connected with the preposition tō (compare the subst.), even in modern usage we have to hope to, for, in. Similarly in G., where the phrase was auf etwas hoffen; later the verb took a genitive, then a pronoun in the accusative, and finally an ordinary object; in biblical language we find also zu gott hoffen. Now, I would connect our word with the form hopu, found twice as part of a compound in Beowulf (450 and 764), where ‘refuge’ gives good sense: hopan to, then, is to ‘take one’s refuge to,’ and to-hopa ‘refuge.’ This verb I take to be at first identical with hop (the only OE. instance I know of this is Ælfric, Hom. 1. 202: hoppode ongean his drihten). We have also one instance of a verb onhupian (Cura Past. 441) ‘draw back, recoil,’ which agrees with ON. hopa ‘move backwards’ (to the quotations in Fritzner may be added Laxd. 49, 15, þeir Osvígssynir hopudu undan).[75] The original meaning seems to have been ‘bend, curb, bow, stoop,’ either in order to leap, or to flee, from something bad, or towards something good; cf. the subst. hip, OE. hype, Goth. hups, Dan. hofte, G. hüfte, Lat. cubitus, etc. (Holthausen, Anglia Beibl., 1904, 350, deals with these words, but does not connect them with hop, -hopu, or hope.) The transition from bodily movement to the spiritual ‘hope’ may have been favoured by the existence of the verb OE. hogian ‘think,’ but is not in itself more difficult than with, e.g., Lat. ex(s)ultare ‘leap up, rejoice,’ or Dan. lide på ‘lean to, confide in, trust,’ tillid ‘confidence, reliance’; and a new word for ‘hope’ was required because the old wen (Goth. wens), vb. wenan, had at an early age acquired a more general meaning ‘opinion, probability,’ vb. ‘suppose, imagine.’ The difficulty that the word for ‘hope’ has single or short p (in Swed., however, pp), while hop, OE. hoppian, has double or long p, is no serious hindrance to our etymology, because the gemination may easily be accounted for on the principle mentioned below (Ch. XX § 9), that is, as giving a more vivid expression of the rapid action.

XVI.—§ 5. Requirements.

It is, of course, impossible to determine once for all by hard-and-fast rules how great the correspondence must be for us to recognize two words as ‘etymologically identical,’ nor to say to which of the two sides, the phonetic and the semantic, we should attach the greater importance. With the rise of historical phonology the tendency has been to require exact correspondence in the former respect, and in semantics to be content with more or less easily found parallels. One example will show how particular many scholars are in matters of sound. The word nut (OE. hnutu, G. nuss, ON. hnot, Dan. nød) is by Paul declared “not related to Lat. nux” and by Kluge “neither originally akin with nor borrowed from Lat. nux,” while the NED does not even mention nux and thus must think it quite impossible to connect it with the English word. We have here in two related languages two words resembling each other not only in sound, but in stem-formation and gender, and possessing exactly the same signification, which is as concrete and definite as possible. And yet we are bidden to keep them asunder! Fortunately I am not the first to protest against such barbarity: H. Pedersen (KZ n.f. 12. 251) explains both words from *dnuk-, which by metathesis has become *knud-, while Falk and Torp as well as Walde think the latter form the original one, which in Latin has been shifted into *dnuk-. Which of these views is correct (both may be wrong) is of less importance than the victory of common sense over phonological pedantry.

There are two explanations which have had very often to do duty where the phonological correspondence is not exact, namely root-variation (root-expansion with determinatives) and apophony (ablaut). Of the former Uhlenbeck (PBB 30. 252) says: “The theory of root determinatives no doubt contains a kernel of truth, but it has only been fatal to etymological science, as it has drawn the attention from real correspondences between well-substantiated words to delusive similarities between hypothetical abstractions.” Apophony inspires more confidence, and in many cases offers fully reliable explanations; but this principle, too, has been often abused, and it is difficult to find its true limitations. Many special applications of it appear questionable; thus, when G. stumm, Dan. stum, is explained as an apophonic form of the adj. stam, Goth. stamms, from which we have the verb stammer, G. stammeln, Dan. stamme: is it really probable that the designation of muteness should be taken from the word for stammering? This appears especially improbable when we consider that at the time when the new word stumm made its appearance there was already another word for ‘mute,’ namely dumm, dumb, the word which has been preserved in English. I therefore propose a new etymology: stumm is a blending of the two synonyms still(e) and dum(b), made up of the beginning of the one and the ending of the other word; through adopting the initial st- the word was also associated with stump, and we get an exact correspondence between dumm, dum, stumm, stum, applied to persons, and dumpf, stumpf, Dan. dump, stump, applied to things. Note that in those languages (G., Dan.) in which the new word stum(m) was used, the unchanged dum(m) was free to develop the new sense ‘stupid’ (or was the creation of stum occasioned by the old word tending already to acquire this secondary meaning?), while dumb in English stuck to the old signification.

XVI.—§ 6. Blendings.

Blendings of synonyms play a much greater rôle in the development of language than is generally recognized. Many instances may be heard in everyday life, most of them being immediately corrected by the speaker (see above, XV § 4), but these momentary lapses cannot be separated from other instances which are of more permanent value because they are so natural that they will occur over and over again until speakers will hardly feel the blend as anything else than an ordinary word. M. Bloomfield (IF 4. 71) says that he has been many years conscious of an irrepressible desire to assimilate the two verbs quench and squelch in both directions by forming squench and quelch, and he has found the former word in a negro story by Page. The expression ‘irrepressible desire’ struck me on reading this, for I have myself in my Danish speech the same feeling whenever I am to speak of tending a patient, for I nearly always say plasse as a result of wavering between pleje [plaiə] and passe. Many examples may be found in G. A. Bergström, On Blendings of Synonymous or Cognate Expressions in English, Lund, 1906, and Louise Pound, Blends, Their Relation to English Word Formation, Heidelberg, 1914. But neither of these two writers has seen the full extent of this principle of formation, which explains many words of greater importance than those nonce words which are found so plentifully in Miss Pound’s paper. Let me give some examples, some of them new, some already found by others:

Such blends are especially frequent in words expressive of sounds or in some other way symbolical, as, for instance:

In slang blends abound, e.g.:

XVI.—§ 7. Echo-words.

Most etymologists are very reluctant to admit echoism; thus Diez rejects onomatopœic origin of It. pisciare, Fr. pisser—an echo-word if ever there was one—and says, “One can easily go too far in supposing onomatopœia: as a rule it is more advisable to build on existing words”; this he does by deriving this verb from a non-existing *pipisare, pipsare, from pipa ‘pipe, tube.’ Falk and Torp refer dump (Dan. dumpe) to Swed. dimpa, a Gothonic root demp, supposed to be an extension of an Aryan root dhen: thus they are too deaf to hear the sound of the heavy fall expressed by um(p), cf. Dan. bumpe, bums, plumpe, skumpe, jumpe, and similar words in other languages.

It may be fancy, but I think I hear the same sound in Lat. plumbum, which I take to mean at first not the metal, but the plummet that was dumped or plumped into the water and was denominated from the sound; as this was generally made of lead, the word came to be used for the metal. Most etymologists take it for granted that plumbum is a loan-word, some being honest enough to confess that they do not know from what language, while others without the least scruple or hesitation say that it was taken from Iberian: our ignorance of that language is so deep that no one can enter an expert’s protest against such a supposition.[77] But if my hypothesis is right, the words plummet (from OFr. plommet, a diminutive of plomb) as well as the verb Fr. plonger, whence E. plunge, from Lat. *plumbicare, are not only derivatives from plumbum (the only thing mentioned by other scholars), but also echo-words, and they, or at any rate the verb, must to a great extent owe their diffusion to their felicitously symbolic sound. In a novel I find: “Plump went the lead”—showing how this sound is still found adequate to express the falling of the lead in sounding. The NED says under the verb plump: “Some have compared L. plumbare ... to throw the lead-line ... but the approach of form between plombar and the LG. plump-plomp group seems merely fortuitous” (!). I see sound symbolism in all the words plump, while the NED will only allow it in the most obvious cases. From the sound of a body plumping into the water we have interesting developments in the adverb, as in the following quotations: I said, plump out, that I couldn’t stand any more of it (Bernard Shaw) | The famous diatribe against Jesuitism points plumb in the same direction (Morley) | fall plum into the jaws of certain critics (Swift) | Nollie was a plumb little idiot (Galsworthy). In the last sense ‘entirely’ it is especially frequent in America, e.g. They lost their senses, plumb lost their senses (Churchill) | she’s plum crazy, it’s plum bad, etc. Related words for fall, etc., are plop, plout, plunk, plounce. Much might also be said in this connexion of various pop and bob words, but I shall refrain.

XVI.—§ 8. Some Conjunctions.

Sometimes obviously correct etymologies yet leave some psychological points unexplained. One of my pet theories concerns some adversative conjunctions. Lat. sed has been supplanted by magis: It. ma, Sp. mas, Fr. mais. The transition is easily accounted for; from ‘more’ it is no far cry to ‘rather’ (cf. G. vielmehr), which can readily be employed to correct or gainsay what has just been said. The Scandinavian word for ‘but’ is men, which came into use in the fifteenth century and is explained as a blending of meden in its shortened form men (now mens) ‘while’ and Low German men ‘but,’ which stands for older niwan, from the negative ni and wan ‘wanting’; the meaning has developed through that of ‘except’ and the sound is easily understood as an instance of assimilation. The same phonetic development is found in Dutch maar, OFris. mar, from en ware ‘were not,’ the same combination which has yielded G. nur. Thus we have four different ways of getting to expressions for ‘but,’ none of which presents the least difficulty to those familiar with the semantic ways of words. But why did these various nations seize on new words? Weren’t the old ones good enough?

Here I must call attention to two features that are common to these new conjunctions, first their syntactic position, which is invariably in the beginning of the sentence, while such synonymous words as Lat. autem and G. aber may be placed after one or more words; then their phonetic agreement in one point: magis, men, maar all begin with m. Now, both these features are found in two words for ‘but,’ about whose etymological origin I can find no information, Finnic mutta and Santal menkhan, as well as in me, which is used in the Ancrene Riwle and a few other early Middle English texts and has been dubiously connected with the Scandinavian (and French?) word. How are we to explain these curious coincidences? I think by the nature of the sound [m], which is produced when the lips are closed while the tongue rests passively and the soft palate is lowered so as to allow air to escape through the nostrils—in short, the position which is typical of anybody who is quietly thinking over matters without as yet saying anything, with the sole difference that in his case the vocal chords are passive, while they are made to vibrate to bring forth an m.

Now, it very often happens that a man wants to say something, but has not yet made up his mind as to what to say; and in this moment of hesitation, while thoughts are in the process of conception, the lungs and vocal chords will often be prematurely set going, and the result is [m] (sometimes preceded by the corresponding voiceless sound), often written hm or h’m, which thus becomes the interjection of an unshaped contradiction. Not infrequently this [m] precedes a real word; thus M’yes (written in this way by Shaw, Misalliance 154, and Merrick, Conrad 179) and Dan. mja, to mark a hesitating consent.

This will make it clear why words beginning with m are so often chosen as adversative conjunctions: people begin with this sound and go on with some word that gives good sense and which happens to begin with m: mais, maar. The Dan. men in the mouth of some early speakers is probably this [m], sliding into the old conjunction en, just as myes is m + yes; while other original users of men may have been thinking of men = meden, and others again of Low German men: these three etymologies are not mutually destructive, for all three origins may have concurrently contributed to the popularity of men. Modern Greek and Serbian ma are generally explained as direct loans from Italian, but may be indigenous, as may also dialectal Rumanian ma in the same sense, for in the hesitating [m] as the initial sound of objections we have one of those touches of nature which make the whole world kin.[78]

XVI.—§ 9. Object of Etymology.

What is the object of etymological science? “To determine the true signification of a word,” answers one of the masters of etymological research (Walde, Lat. et. Wörterb. xi). But surely in most cases that can be achieved without the help of etymology. We know the true sense of hundreds of words about the etymology of which we are in complete ignorance, and we should know exactly what the word grog means, even if the tradition of its origin had been accidentally lost. Many people still believe that an account of the origin of a name throws some light on the essence of the thing it stands for; when they want to define say ‘religion’ or ‘civilization,’ they start by stating the (real or supposed) origin of the name—but surely that is superstition, though the first framers of the name ‘etymology’ (from Gr. etumon ‘true’) must have had the same idea in their heads. Etymology tells us nothing about the things, nor even about the present meaning of a word, but only about the way in which a word has come into existence. At best, it tells us not what is true, but what has been true.

The overestimation of etymology is largely attributable to the “conviction that there can be nothing in language that had not an intelligible purpose, that there is nothing that is now irregular that was not at first regular, nothing irrational that was not originally rational” (Max Müller)—a conviction which is still found to underlie many utterances about linguistic matters, but which readers of the present volume will have seen is erroneous in many ways. On the whole, Max Müller naïvely gives expression to what is unconsciously at the back of much that is said and believed about language; thus, when he says (L 1. 44): “I must ask you at present to take it for granted that everything in language had originally a meaning. As language can have no other object but to express our meaning, it might seem to follow almost by necessity that language should contain neither more nor less than what is required for that purpose.” Yes, so it would if language had been constructed by an omniscient and omnipotent being, but as it was developed by imperfect human beings, there is every possibility of their having failed to achieve their purpose and having done either more or less than was required to express their meaning. It would be wrong to say that language (i.e. speaking man) created first what was strictly necessary, and afterwards what might be considered superfluous; but it would be equally wrong to say that linguistic luxuries were always created before necessaries; yet that view would probably be nearer the truth than the former. Much of what in former ages was felt to be necessary to express thoughts was afterwards felt as pedantic crisscross and gradually eliminated; but at all times many things have been found in language that can never have been anything else but superfluous, exactly as many people use a great many superfluous gestures which are not in the least significant and in no way assist the comprehension of their intentions, but which they somehow feel an impulse to perform. In language, as in life generally, we have too little in some respects, and too much in others.

XVI.—§ 10. Reconstruction.

Kluge somewhere (PBB 37. 479, 1911) says that the establishment of the common Aryan language is the chief task of our modern science of linguistics (to my mind it can never be more than a fragment of that task, which must be to understand the nature of language), and he thinks optimistically that “reconstructions with their reliable methods have taken so firm root that we are convinced that we know the common Aryan grundsprache just as thoroughly as any language that is more or less authenticated through literature.” This is a palpable exaggeration, for no one nowadays has the courage of Schleicher to print even the smallest fable in Proto-Aryan, and if by some miraculous accident we were to find a text written in that language we may be sure it would puzzle us just as much as Tokharian does.

Reconstruction has two sides, an outer and an inner. With regard to sounds, it seems to me that very often the masters of linguistics treat us to reconstructed forms that are little short of impossible. This is not the place to give a detailed criticism of the famous theory of ‘nasalis sonans,’ but I hope elsewhere to be able to state why I think this theory a disfiguring excrescence on linguistic science: no one has ever been able to find in any existing language such forms as mnto with stressed syllabic [n], given as the old form of our word mouth (Falk and Torp even give stmnto in order to connect the word with Gr. stóma), or as dkmtóm (whence Lat. centum, etc.) or bhrghnti̯es or gu̯mskete (Brugmann). Not only are these forms phonetically impossible, but the theory fails to explain the transitions to the forms actually existing in real languages, and everything is much easier if we assume forms like [ʌm, ʌn] with some vowel like that of E. un-. The use in Proto-Aryan reconstructions of non-syllabic i and u also in some respects invites criticism, but it will be better to treat these questions in a special paper.

Semantic reconstruction calls for little comment here. It is evident from the nature of the subject that no such strict rules can be given in this domain as in the domain of sound; but nowadays scholars are more realistic than formerly. Most of them will feel satisfied when moon and month are associated with words having the same two significations in related languages, without indulging in explanations of both from a root me ‘to measure’; and when our daughter has been connected with Gr. thugáter, Skt. duhitár and corresponding words in other languages, no attempt is made to go beyond the meaning common to these words ‘daughter’ and to speculate what had induced our ancestors to bestow that word on that particular relation, as when Lassen derived it from the root duh ‘to milk’ and pictured an idyllic family life, in which it was the business of the young girls to milk the cows, or when Fick derived the same word from the root dheugh ‘to be useful’ (G. taugen: ‘wie die magd, maid von mögen’), as if the daughters were the only, or the most, efficient members of the family. Unfortunately, such speculations are still found lingering in many recent handbooks of high standing: Kluge hesitates whether to assign the word mutter, mother, to the root ma in the sense ‘mete out’ or in the sense found in Sanskrit ‘to form,’ used of the fœtus in the womb. A resigned acquiescence in inevitable ignorance and a sense of reality should certainly be characteristics of future etymologists.