He knew both languages very well (he also felt comfortable in their grammar, as his manual testifies) and believed that being proficient in a language made him qualified for solving etymological puzzles. One of the contributors to NBR was George Webbe Dasent, a brilliant translator of Icelandic sagas and Norwegian folktales.
Sometimes they contained only long critiques of various books, but sometimes they also published essays, poetry, and fiction. In the nineteenth century, “Reviews” of this type flooded both England and the United States. I have no way of finding out who nowadays reads The North British Review (abbreviated below as NBR). Also, we would like to know what happened to final t. Aloft has the already familiar fatal flaw: its root vowel is short. But in the entry aloof even he vacillated between all off and aloft. But, of course, who could single-handedly rewrite the etymologies of a whole language, especially considering that comparative linguistics was just then coming into its own and that not a single reliable dictionary of English word origins had yet been written! At least Mahn, though a Romance scholar, was a native German and therefore had sufficient familiarity with the achievements of the young science. Mahn, a German philologist, who, as one of our correspondents assured me, had never made it to America (I had suspected the truth but could find almost nothing on him) and worked, to use the modern cliché, “from home.” His contribution was important, and many absurd suggestions Noah Webster had launched disappeared from the dictionary. In 1864 Webster’s original etymologies underwent a drastic revision by C. It occurred to some people that aloof was perhaps an alteration of a– loft. However, the search for the true descent of aloof did not stop there. The great Samuel Johnson copied most of his etymologies from Skinner, and the popularity of his dictionary (1755) guaranteed the longevity of the all off derivation. I found it even in an 1870 book, where it was given without discussion as fact. Being aloof does more or less mean being “all off,” and that equation satisfied people for two centuries. Obviously, in 1671 no one would have been bothered by such a detail. In aloof, the vowel is long, while in off it is and has always been short. Skinner’s solution appeared tempting to those who did not care too much about phonetic niceties.
Stephen Skinner, the author of the second etymological dictionary of English (1671 the first was published by John Minsheu in 1617) thought that aloof meant “all off.” It was a relatively new word at his time: the OED has no examples of aloof predating 1535. This fact remained hidden for a long time. The sought-after etymology looks almost self-explanatory, but such is the first impression.Īt present, aloof is used only in its figurative sense (we stay aloof, remain aloof, and so forth hence aloofness), but it arose as a nautical term. Outside those two spheres, everything is “riddled with riddles.” Today I want to tell a story of how the “easy” origin of the adverb aloof was discovered. Moo poses no problems (sound imitation) neither does diesel (a proper name). Most people realize that the beginning of language is lost and that, although we can sometimes reconstruct an earlier stage of a word, we usually stop when it comes to explaining why a given combination of sounds is endowed with the meaning known to us. It may not be too widely known how hard it is to discover the origin of even “easy” words.
0 kommentar(er)
