Etymology vs. meaning — politically important!

[Kirsten Middeke]

Dear all,
In this module we analyse language synchronically. When we ask you to do a morphological analysis, you need to identify morphemes, i.e. the smallest meaning-bearing units in contemporary English. Not in earlier English, and not in the languages that the words may originally have come from.
The English word compatible is monomorphemic (i.e. the word is a simplex) because *compat or *com are not meaningful to speakers unless they know Latin.
Similarly, the word hamburger consists of two morphemes, {ham} and {burger}, because there’s also cheese burger and ham sandwich, for example. It’s a compound. It doesn’t matter that hamburgers don’t usually contain ham or that the word is a borrowing from German, where it was a derivation ({Hamburg}+{er}) before the reanalysed hamburger was borrowed from English. Speakers don’t necessarily know this. They don’t need to know any of this in order to use the word or to create new words like veggie burger or whatever.
The difference between etymology, the history of a word, and the meaning/function of a word, is important, because non-linguists (and sometimes even linguists) sometimes claim that etymology and meaning are the same in order to support their political interests. But we all know that words change their meanings over time as speakers use them in new ways (that’s what makes languages such an effective tool for communication), so we can’t use earlier meanings to prove anything about today.

[Kirsten Middeke]

Here’s a case in point (text by Stefan Hartman):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XKofHun-RSkUfB2aE53szwN4I1Mk2l0f3crIPTO6OT0/edit

[Johannes Brockmeier]

I found the differentiation between etymology and word meaning rather interesting in today’s session. I was reminded of a substitute teacher we had at my German school. He was infamous for being into etymology and he used to go through our list of last names and deduced where they stemmed from historically.

It can be interesting for an etymologist or historians why there are nowadays names like “Miller” and “Mill” or in German “Bauer” or “Karrenbauer” etc.

It is not really relevant to the modern speaker however so we do not (or maybe cannot) divide names into morphemes. Maybe family names are a different category for themselves however.

I just found it interesting how this demonstrates that we look at modern ways of speaking in linguistics and do not have to know infinite genealogical knowledge to make sense of words and meanings.

[Kirsten Middeke]

Well, I’d be the last person to claim that etymology and historical linguistics aren’t fascinating. 🙂 We should look at the synchronic and the diachronic dimension. But we have to keep them apart conceptually. Your example with the names is a good one. I can certainly study the etymology of names (and also their morphology), but the fact that someone is called Müller or Krüger or Potter or Miller (derivation, root {mill} + agent-suffix {er}) doesn’t tell us anything about the person. It tells us something about their distant ancestors, but that doesn’t predict anything about today.
(Btw, do you know Schirm Schirmer in Steglitz?)

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Kirsten Middeke.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Kirsten Middeke.

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