----- Original Message
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Sent: Wednesday, April
03, 2002 7:39 AM
Subject: [tied] Re:
Gothic prestige and borrowing (part 2)
> I'm sorry, but I don't know how one deduces "primary meaning" even
if you have fifty entries. The lettered elite of the time may have used
the "tertiary" meaning and just used it often and that was what was
preserved.
But a reasonable initial hypothesis is that
the predominant documented meaning, deducible from the textual context in which
the word occurs (your own advice, a while ago) is "primary" rather than
"tertiary" (in terms of probability, not absolute certainty, which is
unattainable anyway).
> Let me also suggest it's not "emblematic" versus
"ornithological." There was no ornithologists around at the time. I
don't remember a single early reference to someone critically observing an eagle
in the wild or accurately describing one in that context. That is the
trouble with identifying old bird names with modern ornithology. And
though we don't know how common an eagle was in every day experience, it's a
good bet - if it was a modern "eagle" - that it was rare.
Eagles are probably even rarer
nowadays than they used to be, and the common experience of ordinary people (as
opposed to eagle experts) is not that different from the experience of our
ancestors. The meaning of the word "eagle" is not very precise even today (the
word refers in non-technical use to several different genera of living
birds and to the "emblematic" eagle). It's true that we occasionally encounter
real eagles in zoos and nature documentaries, but "modern ornithology" has
hardly become part of everybody's intellectual equipment (ask anyone in
Britain how the golden eagle differs from the sea eagle).
> We do know that bird representations on coins and elsewhere
were named using the "borrowed" word, eagle. We also know the "emblematic"
eagle was more than just a picture of some bird. The symbol and the word
itself had many connotations, some probably much more meaningful in people's
lives than a live bird could ever be. And that included everything
from biblical and religious and political meanings to inn signs to
coinage.
_We_ know that? I've done some checking. It seems that
<ern> could stand for the "emblematic" or "biblical" eagle as well. A good
example is Orm (ca. 1200): "Wass inn an ærness like, / Forr þatt itt shollde
tacnenn uss Johan þe Goddspellwrihhte." (At about the same time Latin
<aquila> was glossed "ærn .i. eigle".) On the other hand, "egle" refers to
living birds at least as frequently as it does to the eagle symbol: "Vpon his
hand he bar for his deduyt / An egle tame, as any lilie whyt" (Chaucer, _The
Knight's Tale_).
> Let me go back to my point. Calling these two words the same
word for all purposes EXCEPT for the difference in prestige is clearly not the
case. They carried different histories and bundles of different
meanings. Only a strict neo-platonist could seriously say that the words
referred in some ultimate sense to something abstract called an
eagle.
Well, only a strict functionalist would
insist that their meanings should be artificially separated just because they
are different _forms_ with different histories. The textual evidence
shows at least that the meanings and functions of the two
words overlapped to such an extent that they can be regarded as competing
for the same semantic slot.
> Take it a step further. The word <conscientia> was
probably being spoken on English soil hundreds of years before <inwit>
would have been "coined." "Conscience" had already been a concept of
immense importance in Christian doctrine for centuries. ("Redi ad conscientiam
tuam, ipsam interroga..." Augustine.) It was the name of a key element in
daily monastic practice ("cases of conscience".) By the time it was
"borrowed", many English speakers should have been exposed to it - in Latin -
for generations. And of course <conscience>, the English word, seems
at least as old as <inwit>.
> So the answer here might be that
"conscience" was already English - borrowed before there was a "perfectly
functional Anglo-Saxon synonym" and borrowed English words whatever their source
beat made-up words whatever their source. But it should be noted that the
borrowed "prestige" of conscience apparently wasn't enough to stop someone's
attempt at supplying a perfectly functional Anglo-Saxon synonym.
Actually, as far as I've been able to
check, they make their début hand in hand in Middle English, in _Ancrene
Riwle_ (ca. 1200-1230): "... ure ahne conscience, þet is, ure inwit
...".
> There's also the possibility, however, that "a coincidentally
similar but etymologically different word" from Old English, <inwit>, was
not so coincidental and not so etymologically different.
OE inwit is a by-spelling of <inwid>
< *inwid- 'malice, injustice, wickedness' (cf. OSax. inwid, OIc. ívið). It
_is_ etymologically different.
> Consider the Christian practice of
adapting native words to new Christian meanings (e.g., German <geist>).
The OE <inwit> (deceit) should certainly have been a ripe target for that,
since it involved both conscience and morality. I suspect the conclusion
that the words are not connected may be again mainly for convenience.
<inwit> as deceit in OE implies the word may have been carrying quite a
bit of non-Christain baggage and what evidence do we have of when exactly it
"disappeared?" And I also suspect that some of that old baggage slipped
through in some of the references in OED, despite the hard work of _Ayenbite of
Inwyt_ and other obvious proselytizing examples. I'd suggest that
<inwit> was an attempt to target a word with some bad old meanings.
It's survival, after those meanings were dissipated by cross-talk, was
irrelevant to almost anyone.
The OED references might not suffice, but
_The Middle English Dictionary_ records dozens of occurrences of both
<inwit> and <conscience>, carefully distinguishing their shades of
meaning. They seem to be as completely equivalent as matters. For example,
<clene inwit> 'clean conscience' is a frequent collocation (already
in _Ancrene Riwle_, long before the _Ayenbite of Inwyt_). What's also
important is that there is absolutely no ME attestation of <inwit> meaning
anything negative like "deceit", and since the word is by no means rare, we can
quite safely assume that OE <inwid/inwit> was completely extinct at that
time. Had anyone wanted to "target" a native word to express the Christian
concept of 'conscience', that would have been the worst imaginable choice, like,
say, making "theft" stand for "justice". ME <in-wit> was a brand-new
coinage.
> Forgive me, Piotr, this is not personal. I have come to
respect your knowledge and understanding a great deal in the short time I've
spent on the list. But the prestige explanation with regard to Gothic
borrowings in Slavic seems to be a easy, pat answer used by mainstream
linguistics to account for things that cannot be accounted for by
linguistics. And generally I think seeing borrowings as a reflection of
the relative prestige of two languages misleads us about the importance of how
real, practical information and ideas moved between those languages.
Come
on, Steve,
I find this dispute thoroughly
enjoyable, and I don't take any part of it as personal. We seem to have
different approaches to some problems, which is an altogether healthy situation.
You emphasise functional explanations. I do not believe in maxims like
"languages do not produce/tolerate purposeless variety"; to my simple mind, they
often do, and trivial redundancy is both generated and tolerated in natural
languages. Words with practically the same meaning, even if they have different
register values or slightly different connotations (not necessarily to all
speakers), may "compete for survival" and either divide a fragment of semantic
space between them, or oust the competitor, or even continue to coexist for
centuries in some kind of dynamic equilibrium. If only one survives,
greater sociolinguistic prestige may often prove to be the crucial selective
factor. I do not offer that as a one-size-fits-all explanation. I merely want to
note that borrowings are not always "necessary" new words for new concepts. They
often represent new _fashionable_ terms for old concepts, especially
in partly bilingual communities. For example, it's quite common for
numerals (words with a fairly fixed meaning) to diffuse between unrelated or
distantly related languages even if there is no "necessity" involved. Many of
the Dravidian languages in India have borrowed the numerals '4'-'10' (as well as
the decads and '100') from Indo-Aryan, despite the fact that Proto-Dravidian
lacked nothing in that respect.
Piotr