<div style="text-align: center; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">=========================================================================<br>L O W L A N D S - L - 24 February 2008 - Volume 01<br style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">
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=========================================================================<br></div><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="HcCDpe"><span class="EP8xU" style="color: rgb(0, 104, 28);"><a href="mailto:foga0301@stcloudstate.edu">foga0301@stcloudstate.edu</a></span></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Subject: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="HcCDpe">LL-L "Etymology" -on the value of wild ideas<br></span><p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span>Dear Ron
and all Etymology practitioners out there,</span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span>
I'm still trying to connect. Okay, I think I see the distinction
you're making here when you say:</span> <i><span style="font-size: 9pt; color: rgb(79, 129, 189);">"</span></i><i><span style="font-size: 9pt; color: rgb(79, 129, 189);">I'm not saying it but throwing it out there
as a wild idea." </span></i><span>That's
okay with me that you're not sure about the idea you're proposing.
I wasn't asking you "to be sure". I just didn't
know if that was the hypothesis you were "throwing out there".
I love it the way it is. My additions from sociolinguistic theory were
meant to add on to it some observations that relate to issues of <i>incommensurablity</i>
between the thought worlds of Persia and Western Europe. </span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span>
I'm working on another topic that is equally hard to nail down "for
sure"—which is the way epistemological differences don't
translate exactly. I'm looking at subtle slippages between words
like <i>enclosure</i> and <i>edge</i> that open up hidden perceptual connotations
<i>that don't have any referent </i>beyond their culture of origin. We can
translate most of what a word means, but not these hidden things that hold the
deepest meanings. So…. when you hold out two nearly identical word
families [garden and park] that have nearly identical semantic fields, and you
point to profound (or even possibly profound) etymological distinctions,…
well, then you give me a place to start adding socio-perceptual distinctions
that would add credibility to what you're "throwing out there".
</span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span>
Okay then just think for a minute about there possibly being such a thing as
two parallel ways to talk about <i>enclosures</i> and <i>edges</i>. If you're
right about these wild ideas of yours, then <i><u>both</u></i> these terms can
move across cultural/worldview boundaries with the <i><u>one</u></i> having a
deeper Persian take on space relations (enclosures being linked to Persian ways
of thinking) and the <i><u>other</u></i> having a deeper Western take on space
relations (such that the edges between spaces are the focus). This is a
huge difference, and one which notoriously <i>incommensurable.</i> It would be "nice"
if we had a way to talk about such differences. But given the reality
that these are often misunderstood in cross-cultural exchanges, you would
expect these two ways to speak of enclosures and edges as confusingly imprecise—and
falsely interchangeable.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span>
The reality is that it is easy not to get the deeper meaning of any such word when
it is used outside its cultural of origin. One can <i>say</i> the word
and one's foreign audience simply <i>hears</i> a different word (semantically).
The full semantic range of such wandering words would then turn out to be
identity on the surface, which is what you get when you put both your hypotheses
side-by-side as I did. It looks like you have no basis for claiming ["saying"]
that they are distinct families, except perhaps at this deepest level when the
entire worldview underlying a word needs to shift in order to move it into a
new cultural 'region' or way of perceiving space. </span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span> Okay,
so, I too have a wild thought, I must admit. But might it be that yours
and mine are stronger together? That's the real question I have for you: is
what you do think of what I have added to your idea? If you dare to put your
two hypotheses side-by-side… are they strengthened by what I add? <i>Despite</i>
the semantic overlap between these word families, do they still make sense as
markers of deeper epistemological distinctions that would otherwise not ever be
commensurable?</span> <span>Oh
my, that's a hard question even to express, let alone confirm as true since
people rarely (if ever) worry if they are using such words precisely like this.
But I'm only "throwing it out," as you say. It's
interesting to think of such verbal precision as even being possible. But if it
were, just think of the kinds of conversations it would lead to between Muslims
and the Western Christian tradition. In a way, your twin hypotheses make a
wonderful way to start such a conversation (whether or not they are correct as
stated)…. </span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span>that's
enough for one email….</span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span>Gael Fonken</span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(79, 129, 189);">Ron wrote:</span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(79, 129, 189);">"Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of etymology,
Gael! It offers thrilling rides through time and space, and it also offers new
ways of looking at cultural concepts, social evolution and human perception.
Some find those rides addictive. <b><i>It's not all frivolous fun.</i></b> You
often stop in wonderment when you realize that it all boils down to a fairly
small number of word roots. And at that point <b><i>it no longer seems absurd</i></b>
to go beyond what we now consider a language family, to consider relationships
on grander scales."</span><span><br>
</span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">I
can relate to this kind of wildness…. Thanks.</span></p><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">----------</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From: R. F. Hahn <<a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com" target="_blank">sassisch@yahoo.com</a>><span></span></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Subject: Etymology<br><br>Hi, Gael!<br><br>That's a tough one indeed. I'm not sure I got it. I think you are talking about semantic shifts in lexical exportation and the fact that loanwords don't usually come with their entire historical, philosophical and cultural baggage, that therefore a combined approach might yield more precise findings with regard to semantic loss or detail in semantic shift.<br>
<br>Words tend to undergo semantic shifts and expansion already within a given language or within a close-knit language group. In most cases it is semantic expansion, very often followed by semantic loss, namely loss of intermediate steps. (Bear in mind that the number of word roots within a family tends to be surprisingly small and that semantic expansion is thus necessary.)<br>
<br>Consider the case of the already mentioned cognates: *<i>tūn</i> > German <i>Zaun</i> 'fence', Low Saxon <i>Tuun</i> 'fence' ~ 'garden', Dutch <i>toen</i> 'garden', Scots <i>toon</i> 'town', English "town," or *<i>gata</i> > German <i>Gasse</i> '(small, narrow connecting) street', Scandinavian <i>gata</i>, <i>gade</i> 'street', Middle Saxon <i>gate</i> (fem.)<i> ~ gatte</i> (neut.) 'alley', 'passage way', 'opening' > Modern Low Saxon <i>Gatt</i> 'passageway', 'aperture', 'opening', 'anus', 'backside', 'buttocks' (also Dutch and Afrikaans <i>gat</i>), and also > English "gate." <br>
<br>In the first example, the earlier postulated Indo-European idea of "woven branches (for fencing)" ended up not only meaning "fence" but also that which the fence encloses: "garden" (which is related to "yard" which goes back to IE *<i>ĝhordo-</i> "woven branches (for fencing)" < IE *<i>ĝher-</i> 'to enclose', cf. Altaic: Mongolian <i>ger</i> 'homestead', 'home' '(movable) house', 'yurt', but that's another story ...) Where this shift from to "garden" occurred, the intermediate step of "fence" got lost and another word is needed for it. In Britain, descendants of *<i>tūn</i><i></i> came to denote the entire fenced-in homestead, then probably a cluster of homesteads, and it made the transition to a larger community, hence "town." A native English speaker without this knowledge would not think of weaving branches into fencing when he or she thinks of the meaning of "town." The weaving bit became irrelevant when cognates of this group became generalized as "barrier" to include any type of enclosing, such as walls and ramparts. And here we go outside Germanic and consider Celtic *<i>d</i><i>ūn</i>: Old Irish </span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">dún</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">, Galish </span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">dûnum</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">, Scottish Gaelic </span><a style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" name="dùn"><i>dùn</i>, Welsh <i>din</i> 'heap', 'walled structure', 'fortress' (cf. Scottish Gaelic </a><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Dùn Èideann</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> 'Edinburgh'). I don't think that the leap from 'edge' to '(outside) barrier' to 'fence' is a great one.<br>
<br>Especially when words are adopted across greater genetic and cultural distances they tend to be initially semantically narrow, limited by the cultural contexts within which the adoption occurs. However, once they are nativized (as most loanwords eventually are) they may begin their own, internal semantic shifts and expansion, and the greater the cultural distance between the languages involved is less cultural reference there is and thus the freer a loanword is to develop semantically independently.<br>
<br>However, in many cases cultural ties are close and lasting even between genetically supposedly unrelated languages. The case of Persian <i>*bāġ</i> and its journeys into South and Central Asia may serve as an example here. In the areas that are now Pakistan and Northern India and also throughout Islamicized Turkic-speaking Central Asia (emanating from Persianized urban centers such as Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarkand) Persian literature, especially Persian poetry and song, used to be and in many cases still are considered supreme, and this tradition migrated west into Azerbaijan and Turkey. Anyone with what was/is considered a good formal education was/is able to read and appreciate Persian literature, and writers in Indo-Aryan and Turkic languages have been emulating it, very often slavishly so. Such writers and their readers tend to be intimately familiar with Persian imagery and metaphors, and this includes those that cannot read Persian themselves. In other words, prestige and familiarity allow entire cultural constructs to spread and last.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Regards,</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Reinhard/Ron</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
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