Índice

Bibliografía: p. 233-312

The academic-sounding title of this work is a fair warning of its contents. If terms like Neogrammarian linguistics, phonosemantics, secondary ablaut or cognate cause you to blench, or if you're unfamiliar with the fundamentals of etymology and the history of English and related European languages, you should give it a miss. Furthermore, it isn't a full dictionary but a sampler of things to come. Professor Anatoly Liberman has been working on his dictionary of etymology since 1988. A vast bibliography has been assembled from the literature of linguistics and each entry is the result of detailed analysis. He wrote a general introduction to the subject in 2005, Word Origins and How We Know Them. This volume is a showcase sample of fifty-five entries that will form part of the final work, to test his chosen approach and to get feedback. The entries are all words that are found intractable by current dictionaries. These aren't obscure or rare but among the most basic words in the language, including boy (and girl), bird, Cockney, dwarf, fiddle, ivy, kick, lad (and lass), man, rabbit, understand, witch and yet. Do not expect firm conclusions in every instance: these words are poorly understood for good reasons.