Synchronic Etymologising and Its Role in the Acquisition of Language

• Synchronic etymologising, the act of clarifying a word’s meaning by linking it to similar-sounding words, is a universal phenomenon found across cultures and in children.
• This tendency plays a crucial role in the process of language acquisition.

1 Introduction

• Synchronic etymologising clarifies a word’s meaning through resemblance to other words (e.g., the god Rudra’s name is linked to the verb rud-, ‘to cry’).
• This differs from historical (diachronic) etymology, which traces a word’s origin through time (e.g., Hindi maim from Sanskrit mayā).
• While common in children and pre-modern cultures, modern linguists do not consider it a valid method for determining meaning.

2 Examples of Synchronic Etymologising in Different Cultures

• The practice is widespread in pre-modern societies.
• Examples include Sumerian myths (deity Ninkasi curing mouth [ka] pain), ancient Egypt (weben/ben wordplay), the Hebrew Bible (Adam from adama, ‘earth’), Greek myths (Odysseus from odussomai, ‘I am angry’), medieval Europe (amor as a-mor, ‘without death’), and Trobriand Islands magic.
• The tendency can also be found in some modern nationalistic writings.

3 Attempts to Systematise

• Plato’s Cratylus is the classical Greek text on the topic, exploring whether words have a natural connection to their meaning.
• In the dialogue, Socrates investigates the idea that primary names are formed from letters that imitate the nature of things (e.g., the sound rho expressing activity).
• Socrates ultimately finds this theory insufficient, concluding that convention must also play a role in establishing the correctness of names.
• Yāska’s Nirukta is the classical Indian text, which aimed to systematise the etymologies found in the Vedic Brāhmaṇas.
• The Nirukta establishes rules for etymologising, prioritising the word’s meaning over phonetic similarity.

4 Minimal Meaning Bearers

• Unlike Plato’s Cratylus, Yāska’s Nirukta does not propose that individual sounds have inherent meanings.
• The Indian grammarian Patañjali also argued against sounds having individual meanings.
• However, a separate mystical tradition in Indian religious literature (Vedic texts, Upaniṣads) did assign specific meanings to syllables and sounds (e.g., analysing the syllables of hṛ-da-yam, ‘heart’).
• This culminated in Tantric texts, which attribute specific metaphysical significance to every sound of the Sanskrit alphabet, especially in meaningless seed-mantras (bīja-mantras).

5 Why Synchronic Etymologising?

• The tendency to etymologise arises from the fundamental process of language acquisition, which involves ‘chunking’ speech into meaningful units (phonemes, syllables, words).
• Children learn language by analysing utterances to identify these chunks, and this analytical tendency continues below the level of words and morphemes.
• This suggests that our mental concepts are not pre-existing but are formed by segmenting the linguistic utterances we hear.
• The innate human tendency to segment language, even beyond what is objectively meaningful, supports theories that early protolanguage may have been holistic (holophrastic).