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Philip Durkin, The Oxford guide to etymology. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2009. Pp. x +350. Hardback £25.00.

Article  in  English Language and Linguistics · March 2011

DOI: 10.1017/S1360674310000341

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 REVIEWS 183

(Received 18 June 2010)

doi:10.1017/S1360674310000341
Philip Durkin, The Oxford guide to etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009. Pp. x +350. Hardback £25.00.

Reviewed by Paul T. Roberge, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and

University of Stellenbosch

The term etymology, in the volume under review as in most modern discussions, is
defined as the investigation of word histories generally, and also as an account of
the origin and historical development of individual words. As a scholarly practice,
etymology has traditionally been concerned most especially (but not exclusively) with
‘those areas where there is a doubt about a stage in a word’s history, or where the
documentary record fails us’ (p. 284; similarly, pp. 1, 291). Words and lexicalized
phrases and their origins and shifting meanings are, obviously enough, of central
concern to professional lexicographers, historical linguists and philologists. But they
have intrigued non-specialist scholars and lay persons with a very wide variety of
interests and intellectual backgrounds.
The author of this work is principal etymologist for the Oxford English Dictionary
and has lectured, broadcast and published regularly on English etymology. He addresses
this practical introduction ‘to anyone who has taken the important first step of realizing
that etymologies are the result of research, and would like to discover something about
the nature of that research, and the principles and methodologies which underlie it’
(p. ix). The take-away point for readers entirely new to the field is that the compressed
etymologies that one finds in many standard dictionaries are the product of extensive
research, which can be difficult and fraught with uncertainties. Durkin has further
attempted ‘to frame this book so that it is addressed most centrally to someone who
has an interest in historical linguistics . . . Etymology is a part of this wider field,
and anyone’s understanding of etymology will be greatly enriched by at least some
acquaintance with the broader concerns of the discipline as a whole’ (p. ix). Most of
the data are drawn from English. The narrow focus is offset by the opportunity for
readers to avail themselves of current etymological research for the third edition of
the OED, with which the author is personally involved. Though not unprecedented
internationally (cf. Seebold 1981), a textbook dedicated specifically to etymology is
very much to be welcomed.
The book consists of nine substantive chapters and a brief conclusion, which are
followed by a glossary, suggestions for further reading, references, a general index and
an index of word forms. The first chapter lays out some basic concepts (such as cognacy,
language families, comparative and internal reconstruction), provides the rationale for
the study of etymology and describes what an etymologist does. Oddly, perhaps, the
184 E N G L I S H L A N G UA G E A N D L I N G U I S T I C S

term etymon, which would seem to fall into the category of ‘basic concepts’, is defined
quite precisely in the glossary but not upon its first (p. 18) and subsequent occurrences;
nor is it entered in the index. The histories of English friar and sad work well as
Paradebeispiele. The presentation of Grimm’s and Verner’s Laws, as an illustration
of the relationship between sound change and etymology and a demonstration of the
comparative method, is clear and should be comprehensible to a general readership,
though a chart or list of phonetic symbols used in the book might have been helpful. The
establishment of manual ‘involving the hand, operated by the hand’ in English (from
Latin manuālis ← manus ‘hand’, via French) at the expense of Middle English handly
and semantically narrowed handy ‘skilled with the hands, convenient to handle or use’
is a nice example of how heavy borrowing can alter diagrammatic patterns in word
formation. Durkin takes pains to alert the neophyte to the existence of false cognates,
such as English care beside Latin cūra ‘care, concern, guardianship, administration’,
Latin deus ‘god’ beside Greek θ´os ‘god’, which show similarities in form and meaning
but obtain from different roots, and the ‘etymological fallacy’, that is, the belief that
knowledge of a word’s origin and particularly its original meaning should inform
present-day usage.
Chapter 2, entitled ‘What is a word? Which words need etymologies?’, deals with
the linguistic unit that is central to lexicography and etymology. Durkin discusses the
analysis of linguistic forms into words, showing how none of the conventional criteria
(meaning, prosody, orthography, morphotactics) can be strictly applied. I was surprised
to find no mention of a long-established working definition of word as ‘a minimum free
form’ (Bloomfield 1933: 178). For present purposes, Durkin uses word rather loosely in
the sense of lexeme (pp. 41, 296) and refers to words by their citation forms (lemmata,
though Durkin eschews this term), that is, the word forms that conventionally represent
the canonical forms of lexemes in dictionaries.
Lexical innovation and integration may (but need not) progress along a
developmental continuum: nonce formation (ad hoc coinage by individuals) >
institutionalization (maintenance of semantic transparency, conventional use within
a speech community ‘in a given context or with a fairly specific meaning’) >
lexicalization (‘opaque – in meaning, or composition, or both’) (p. 49). Durkin is,
of course, free to define his terms as he deems appropriate, but one would appreciate
coherence and consistency in return. A statement that ‘institutionalized words . . .
remain (at least relatively) transparent’ (p. 49) does not square with an allusion to
‘words with a non-predictable, institutionalized meaning’ a few pages later (p. 59). Nor
does it help that the definition of institutionalized in the glossary (p. 292) refers to social
norms with no mention of semantic transparency. Lexicalization (at least as I understand
the term) refers to the expression of a concept by means of a word or the creation of
a lexical unit out of a group of words, the meaning of which is beyond the sum of its
parts. The concept ‘act of untrammeled power, enforcement of power’ is lexicalized
in Afrikaans in a relatively transparent complex word (kragdadigheid) but not in
English. (South African English has borrowed the Afrikaans word.) Strictly speaking,
conventionalization and compositionality are conceptually independent phenomena.
 REVIEWS 185

The personal indiscretion of a politician has given American English hiking the
Appalachian Trail, a new, non-compositional, abruptly lexicalized euphemism for
‘sneaking off with one’s lover’.4
While it may be feasible to compile an etymological dictionary that includes all
of the extant words of a philological language (e.g. Lehmann 1986 for Gothic), this
is obviously not practical for living languages, the lexicons of which are infinitely
extendible. Moreover, productive word-forming patterns, i.e. those capable of forming
new words (e.g. affixation in un-, pre-, re-, -ism, -ly), can generate an enormous number
of one-off forms that are deployed within the context of particular utterances and are not
stored in the mental dictionaries of the interlocutors. With these considerations in mind,
Durkin sets the following priorities for etymological coverage: (i) monomorphemic
words (acorn, lord, lady are informative examples discussed in this chapter);
(ii) complex words containing semantically opaque bound elements (so-called
‘cranberry morphs’) that are obscure or foreign in origin (e.g. lukewarm, cranberry; cf.
Low German kranebere, Standard German Kranbeere) or native fossils (e.g. winsome,
raspberry); (iii) words that are formally analyzable but semantically non-compositional
(e.g. penknife, handsome); (iv) idioms (e.g. to cut a caper ‘to make a playful, skipping
movement, to act ridiculously’); and (v) ‘any word which has a form which is not
explicable by the productive word-formation processes of the language’ (p. 59).
Chapter 3, ‘Are words coherent entities?’, examines homonymy, polysemy, formal
and semantic merger (or near-merger), and split in word form. Although one might cavil
at the quirky title and the choice of merger and split over convergence and divergence
(given the close association of the former with historical phonology), this chapter is
quite solid. Durkin cautions that relations of polysemy and homonymy fluctuate over
time and can work in both directions. The English word crane in the meaning ‘machine
for the hoisting and lowering of heavy objects’ is a metaphorical extension of crane ‘a
type of long-legged, long-necked bird’. However, it is debatable whether contemporary
speakers feel a connection between these senses, and the OED and other dictionaries
treat them under separate lemmata. With regard to semantic convergence, Durkin recalls
Bloomfield’s (1933: 436) suggestion that since the loss of medial ∗ -h- and of post-tonic
vowels in English has made ear ‘spike or head of corn’ (< OE ēar < ∗ ahur < PGmc.
∗
ahuz) homophonous with ear ‘organ for hearing’ (< OE ēare < PGmc. ∗ auzō- or
perhaps ∗ auzān), and since ‘the meanings have some resemblance, ear of grain has
become a marginal (transferred) meaning of ear of an animal’. As Durkin points out,
Bloomfield recognized that semantic proximity is not subject to precise measurement;
linguists and lexicographers will insist on describing such forms as homophonous pairs.
Bloomfield regarded meaning as very difficult to investigate. Yet, he opined that ‘the
only type of semantic expansion that is relatively well understood, is what we may call
the accidental type: some formal change . . . results in a locution which coincides with
some old form of not too remote meaning’ (1933: 436). Historiography aside, Durkin
does not find Bloomfield’s example entirely convincing, but the larger point is that ‘the

4 www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=127542475
186 E N G L I S H L A N G UA G E A N D L I N G U I S T I C S

actual history of words may be totally obscure to speakers of a language, and certainly
it is very feasible that new, historically unjustified links in meaning may become es-
tablished between etymologically unrelated homonyms’ (p. 79) or for that matter near-
homonyms. An instructive example would be the controversies that have surrounded
the etymologically innocuous adjective niggardly ‘stingy, miserly’ (< ON hnPggr,
cf. OE hnēaw ‘mean, stingy’, Dutch nauw ‘strict, narrow, close’), which is probably
irredeemably tainted by its formal likeness to an unrelated, deeply offensive epithet.
The next five chapters survey processes of word formation (chapter 4), lexical bor-
rowing and imposition, the latter as a consequence of language shift and code switching
(chapters 5 and 6), the effects of sound change on lexis (chapter 7) and semantic change
(chapter 8). The approach is preponderantly traditional, though Durkin does take pains
to show how insights from grammaticalization theory, variationist accounts of change in
progress, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, and contemporary research on transferabil-
ity in language contact (viz. the borrowing scale of Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 74–6;
Thomason 2001: 70–1) are significant for etymological research. In his preface Durkin
writes that he has ‘tried to pay particular attention to those areas which are important
for etymology but which receive relatively little attention in most introductory books on
historical linguistics’ (p. ix). With the exception of an approach that stresses connections
between word histories and the history of material culture – metonymically deriving its
name from the journal Wörter und Sachen (1909–42) – virtually all of the fundamental
concepts of language change surveyed herein find ample treatment in the textbooks
that I have used in courses for beginning and advanced students (respectively Trask
& Millar 2007; Hock 1991). Lacking is a discussion of so-called Wanderwörter (a
living example of which is vuvuzela ‘stadium horn’, courtesy of the 2010 FIFA World
Cup tournament in South Africa), which can pose special problems for etymology,
and macro-comparative reconstruction of global etyma (e.g. Ruhlen 1994), a subject
of fierce controversy on which the reviewer takes no stand. On the positive side, it is
commendable that chapter 9 on onomastics and etymology is there at all.
The value of these chapters – indeed, of the work as a whole – lies in the illustrative
etymologies themselves, which overall are well chosen and often interesting in their
own right. Inevitably, specialists will take issue with matters of presentation, fact, or
detail, particularly in regard to the enduring cruxes. To cite but one instance: the date
and location of the first appearance of English big – c. 1300 in northern texts – and its
probable earliest meaning of ‘sturdy, strong, mighty’ (> ‘large’) are suggestive of Old
Norse as a source. Durkin notes the regional use of bugge ‘mighty man’ and bugga
‘rich, wealthy, powerful’ in modern Norwegian, but asserts that there is no obvious
etymon recorded in the early stages of any of the Scandinavian languages. What he
fails to mention is that there is some evidence from Old Danish and Old Swedish
for an ON by-name Buggi ‘fat man’ (Fellows Jensen 1968: 68) or ‘powerful man’
(Peterson 2002: 40), which lends slight support to a Norse connection, if one stipulates
that Middle English big(ge) continues a variant showing umlaut of the tonic vowel
and subsequent unrounding. The picture clouds over again if big(ge) has a connection
to by-names or surnames of the form Bigge, Bigga (which is by no means certain),
 REVIEWS 187

the earliest attestations of which occur in southern counties, especially Kent, from the
first half of the eleventh century (pp. 278–9). I agree that these data are inconclusive,
though in etymologizing this word, one must determine whether congeners in other
Germanic dialects are extant but masked by accretions of phonological, morphological
and/or semantic change. Davis (2000) proposes an etymology that traces English big
back to Proto-Germanic times. This hypothesis, too, may be wrong, but it does take
the requisite heuristic step.
Etymology concentrates on the history of single words (and morphemes). ‘Chaque
mot a son histoire’ – the anti-neogrammarian aphorism variously attributed to Jules
Gilliéron or Hugo Schuchardt – conveys something fundamental about the enterprise,
mutatis mutandis, insofar as ‘the etymologies in any dictionary are a set of unique
word histories, resulting from the interplay of manifold factors’ (p. 209). Etymology
is thus a part of lexicography as well as historical linguistics. As an independent field,
lexicography takes what it needs from linguistics and can ignore the rest. The Oxford
guide to etymology is a worthy introductory text for students and general readers whose
needs and interests fit this profile.
The book does not have the theoretical grounding and precision that would make it
suitable for use in a linguistics curriculum. Definitions of basic terms are all too often
soft and oversimplified. Syntax, for example, is casually described as ‘the study of the
meaning relations between words within a sentence’ (p. 2); the statement ‘monomor-
phemic words are composed of only a single morpheme or meaningful unit’ (p. 43) is in
conflict with the strange definition of morpheme in the glossary: ‘a minimal meaningful
unit within a complex word’ (p. 293); infixes, we learn, ‘interrupt a morphological base’
(pp. 47, 288); disyllabic words containing an initial open syllable are characterized as
words that have ‘only one medial consonant’ (pp. 63, 184); defining grammaticalization
as ‘the process by which words develop increasingly grammatical meanings and
functions over time’ (p. 224) isn’t very helpful, though one does encounter this
tautology in the specialized literature, too (e.g. Heine & Kuteva 2002: 377). The unwary
reader might infer from the extract on p. 247 that dynamic modality (ability, physical
possibility) is a synonym for, rather than a value of, root (non-epistemic) modality –
the other value of which, deontic modality, is not so identified three lines later.
This volume is handsomely designed and produced, with very few technical glitches
beyond an ugly misprint on p. 182 (‘Gimm’s’ for ‘Grimm’s’). My wish for its readers,
if I may borrow American poet John Ciardi’s signature sign-off from his weekly
etymological rambles on radio during the 1980s: Good words to you.

Reviewer’s address:
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
CB no. 3160 Dey Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599–3160
USA
ptr@email.unc.edu
 188 E N G L I S H L A N G UA G E A N D L I N G U I S T I C S

References
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Davis, Garry W. 2000. Notes on the etymologies of English big and Gothic ga-. American
Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 12, 41–52.
Fellows Jensen, Gillian. 1968. Scandinavian personal names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.
Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2002. On the evolution of grammatical forms. In Alison Wray
(ed.), The transition to language, 376–97. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hock, Hans Henrich. 1991. Principles of historical linguistics, 2nd edn. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Lehmann, Winfred P. 1986. A Gothic etymological dictionary. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Peterson, Lena. 2002. Nordiskt runnamnslexikon, 4th edn. Uppsala: Språk- och
folkminnesinstitutet.
Ruhlen, Merritt. 1994. On the origin of languages: Studies in linguistic taxonomy. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Seebold, Elmar. 1981. Etymologie: Eine Einführung am Beispiel der deutschen Sprache.
Munich: C. H. Beck.
Thomason, Sarah Grey. 2001. Language contact: An introduction. Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press.
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and
genetic linguistics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Trask, R. L. 2007. Trask’s historical linguistics, 2nd edn, revised by Robert McColl Millar.
London: Hodder Arnold.

(Received 11 July 2010)

doi:10.1017/S1360674310000353
Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad, Register, genre, and style. Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 344.

Reviewed by Elena Semino, Lancaster University

In Register, genre, and style Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad distil in the form
of an undergraduate textbook the well-known work on register variation they have
produced, both individually and collaboratively, over the last two decades. The result
is a remarkably accessible and comprehensive book, which will also be appropriate
for more advanced students, as well as for scholars from a range of areas who may
be looking for a state-of-the-art but practical introduction to empirical research on
register, genre and style.
In the introductory chapter, the authors define registers, genres and styles as different
perspectives in the study of text varieties. The analysis of registers focuses on pervasive
patterns of linguistic features which stand in a functional relation to the situational
context of use, as in the case of the use of first- and second-person pronouns in
conversation. The analysis of genres focuses on the conventional ways in which texts

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