Jan 31, 2025
i want to get more into etymology, any recs for specific books or ways to study it besides reading a dictionary?
Though you don’t need to learn a second language to study etymology, by shallow exposure you may begin to make organic connections between cognates — a Romance language is useful for comparison, you can see where English has inherited the Latin influence and where it’s diverged. Beyond that, I’d mainly suggest having a baseline understanding of global migratory & trade history. The most broadly interesting etymologies emerge at points of encounter between different linguistic groups — the study of one reinforces the other. You can see Moorish influence in Spain in ‘aceite’ for oil, when most of Europe (even the Germanics) inherit from the Latin ‘oleum’. Adjacently, if you’re interested in linguistics, you should read into Saussure for grounding in semiotics — secondary texts suffice.
For a more fun/popsci approach, Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue is great
I recall Baugh and Cable's "A History of the English Language" is quite comprehensive, though rather dry. It of courses focuses on other elements beside etymology. It has been too long since I've read this to fully endorse it, but it stands out in my memory. I also enjoy the entries in the "Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language". This book is not an ordinary encyclopedia. You can read it cover to cover. I will always be an evangelist for Gardner's Modern American Usage, which is not directly about etymology but contains many entries that reference it. If you don't feel like actually learning Greek, Latin, Old English, or French, you may profit from memorizing common roots, prefixes, and suffixes, especially in Greek and Latin. I was forced to do this in school, and it has been beneficial.
Garner is great. I'm currently reading the 2022 edition of his usage dictionary and it includes ratios of usage in print. For example, > (reckless abandon vs. reckless abandonment): 11:1 > (wild abandon vs. wild abandonment): 9:1
democritusjrjr1 year ago
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/lrc/ UT Austin's Linguistics research center is an awesome resource.
amf1 year ago
Going to second the comment below, studying other languages is absolutely the best way. Learning French and Spanish honestly taught me so, so much more about English than any middle school English teacher talking about commas versus semicolons ever could. But if you're looking for a book, it's not 100 percent etymology, but it's etymology-adjacent -- George Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By. It's more about how our turns of phrase come about rather than our individual words (or "morphemes" if you wanna be a dork about it), but it feels like he's just playing pinball with words in the best possible way as he explains the cognitive and social processes that undergird our use of language (and hey look I just mixed a metaphor, and I'm sure Lakoff would have a thing or two to say about that).
sugarkane1 year ago
really cool that you know both spanish and french. did you self study, do language immersion, etc.? will check out that lakoff book too
amf1 year ago
So a mix of all of the above. I'm much more confident in French, as I had excellent professors, combined with self-study and immersion and a long-term sensitive-boy infatuation with Frenchy bullshit. Spanish, I'm scraping B1 level to be honest, but like most Americans, I had a modicum of exposure from a young age ("danger" is also "peligro" on the label), which could function as grounds for later development. It's only in the past year I've really dedicated to study at any level, which has made me realize that Spanish is more purely Latin and untouched by the barbarisms of the savage Celt. Also learning Asian languages from an Indo-European background is a whole other mental cataclysm, but that's a separate discussion.
Studying Latin and/or Old English might be interesting for you.
Maybe you could focus on some topics that you are passionate about, find the etymology for those words. For example I have done this with plants and birds and I think it's helped my general Latin and understanding of etymology
This is good advice, definitely will make it easier to reinforce new etymology learned if I'm applying it to things I'm already familiar with