Voltaire on etymology

[Kevin Tuite]

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Dear colleagues,

A week ago I asked the members of the list if anyone could identify
the source of the quote attributed to Voltaire that etymology is "une
science où les voyelles ne font rien et les consonnes fort peu de
chose". So far, I must sadly report, no one has been able to do so.
Bob Rankin, Stefan Georg and Alexis Manaster-Ramer reported having
searched at one time or another for the quote in Voltaire's writings,
without success.
Stefan took pains to point out that "this doesn't necessarily mean
that the quote is made up. A possible source, apart from published
works of V:'s, maybe his correspondence, as far as it got published
in *other* peoples' collections of letters, or other peoples'
diaries, or, if worse comes to worse,  in other peoples'
works//letters, who mention the quote as "pers. comm.". So it might
be somewhere after all, but not necessarily in a text signed V." He
is right, of course, but I cannot imagine how anyone, other than an
experienced Voltaire scholar, could ever make an exhaustive search of
this secondary documentation.

Marc Picard sent me a copy of posting No. 8.1459 to the LINGUIST List
(10 Oct 1997), by  Rebecca Larche Moreton, which summarized the
results of an earlier unsuccessful attempt to track down the origin
of this oft-cited quote. Among those who responded to that inquiry,
Peter Daniels reported that he had searched the CD of Voltaire's
collected works, and found nothing resembling the phrase in question.
Finally, I asked Konrad Koerner, who is not a subscriber to this
list, but who is well known for his work on the history of
linguistics, if he had any idea about the alleged Voltaire quote. He
told me that some years ago, he went so far as to offer a prize to
anyone who could track down the source of the
alleged quote (he didn't say how much he offered). Despite the
financial incentive, no one came forward.

So, the conclusion I derive from the history of unsuccessful attempts
to identify the provenance of the quote -- which appears to be nearly
as long as the history of attributions of the remark to Voltaire --
is that what we have here is an instance of what I strongly suspect
is a more widespread phenomenon. While the vast majority of citations
that make the rounds of a community of scholars circulate according
to accepted norms of acknowledgment and referencing, there is -- at
least in the fields I have some acquaintance with -- a sort of
parallel citation pool of anecdotes, pithy definitions and witty
remarks which are distributed off-the-record, for the most part, but
which surface in published works from time to time. The alleged
Voltaire quote reminds me of the expression "it's turtles all the way
down", which was repeated ad nauseam by anthropologists and linguists
in the 1970s and 80s, and credited to god knows how many different
sources. I recall having heard it attributed to William James,
Bertrand Russell, Clifford Geertz, an Indian (from India), an
"Iroquois sage", and probably others I have forgotten about. I think
Haj Ross was the first linguist to popularize it, but PLEASE DON'T
QUOTE ME! I do not want to be responsible for setting another rumor
into motion.

thanks to all who responded.

Kevin

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Kevin Tuite                                    514-343-6514      (bureau)
Département d'anthropologie                    514-343-2494 (télécopieur)
Université de Montréal
C.P. 6128, succursale centre-ville
Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7                          tuitekj at anthro.umontreal.ca
NOUVEAU! Site Web en construction: http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/
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