Chaque mot a son histoire

[Jacques Bisso]

Rich Alderson wrote:

>On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Carol Justus (cjustus at mail.utexas.edu)
>wrote in passing:

>>Some years ago, Yakov Malkiel, exhaustively studying the
>>details of the Romance languages, took a position often
>>reduced to the slogan "every word has its own history"
>>because he found so many explanations for exceptions to
>>regular sound correspondences.

>Doesn't this particular maxim date back to Hermann Paul
>and the beginnings of dialect geography--on which Schmidt
>based his proposal of the _Wellentheorie_?

In speaking, Malkiel almost always attributed this maxim to the "father"
of dialect linguistics, Jules Gillieron. Here is what Iorgu Iordan (and
John Orr) has to say about it: "The realities of language, however, as
they are revealed in the studies of Gillieron and his disciples, prove
that there can be no talk of applying a phonetic norm to a series of
words, because we never find two words identically situated. Words which
at first sight seem to share the same conditions show themselves, in
fact, to have each a life of its own, different, to a greater or lesser
degree, from that of all the rest. This is the inwardness of another
fundamental principle of the Gillieronian doctrine, mainly, that every
word has its own history -- 'chaque mot a son histoire'." [Iordan-Orr.
1970. An Introduction to Romance Linguistics. p. 170.]

According to Elcock: "The principle that each word has its own
individual history, implicit in the teaching of Gillieron and formulated
in print by his pupil Karl Jaberg, now commands almost universal
acceptance." [W. D. Elcock. 1975. The Romance Languages. p. 164.]

Malkiel writes: "The dictum 'Chaque mot a son historie' has customarily
been ascribed, by friend and foe alike, to Jules Gillieron [...] This
widespread belief in Gillieron's authorship involves a dual
oversimplification. On the one hand, Gillieron, admittedly an
indefatigable toiler and a man endowed with an unfailing flair for,
shall we say, 'detective' work in linguistic reconstruction but
certainly no outstanding theorist, relied heavily on the truly original
thinking of Schuchardt, to whom, characteristically, he dedicated -- on
the occasion of the revered master's seventieth birthday -- the first
collection of his pioneering essays." [Malkiel. 1964. "Each Word Has a
History of Its Own." in Glossa: A Journal of Linguistics. I:2, 1967, pp.
137-149. (also in Malkiel. 1983. From Particular to General Linguistics
: Essays 1965 - 1978.)] In this article, he goes on to investigate
Bloomfield's (!) acceptance of the dictum under discussion.

jim