Unitaz - Karandash

[William Ryan]

Certainly not folk etymology! Vasmer, Trubachev, and the sources they 
relied on, were not just 'folk'. They could have got it wrong but they 
were not naive or stupid - another lesson for the young researcher. The 
article cited below, by Vvedenskaia and Kolesnikov (2000), is in fact 
only repeating Kolesnikov's etymology first published in 1962, which 
though it makes good points does not seem to have received wide 
acceptance and also jumps to conclusions, and like Vasmer's etymology 
leaves many questions unanswered both chronologically and technically. 
The word 'karandash' is not attested in Russia until the last third of 
the seventeenth century, in relatively elevated cultural contexts; there 
are no Russian manuscripts, as far as I can discover, written in pencil; 
the Russians had a perfectly good word for pointed writing instruments 
other than pens - 'pisalo'. The accepted history of graphite is that it 
was first discovered in England in the early seventeenth century and 
that pencils were then developed in various parts of western Europe.  
Muscovites imported all their paper, and in the late seventeenth century 
many other technical items from western Europe. A Turkish/Turkic import 
of that kind at that date seems unlikely and there seems to be no record 
of trade in graphite, or pencils, from either east or west, except 
perhaps one source (1684) cited in the Slovar' russkogo iazyka  XI-XVII 
vv reads: 'v odnom iashchike ruda, nazyvaiut ee po nemetski olovko, a po 
ruski karandash samoi priamoi', which suggests that in fact the material 
may not have been not graphite but one of the lead ores, and imported 
from the west.

All this still leaves the puzzle of where the word comes from - and it 
does indeed sound Turkic. Chernykh, in his Istoriko-etimologicheskii 
slovar' sovremmenogo iazyka, concludes his longish article by saying 
that it is a strange that in Petrine Russia there was no word of western 
origin used for pencil.

As far as I am concerned the word karandash still awaits a satisfactory 
etymology.

Will Ryan

augerot wrote:
> Thank you, Dino49, for your thoroughness. It is a good lesson for the young researcher: one shouldn't jump to conclusions, the article astutely concludes that the elements in карандаш aren't "black" and "stone" but more like "stick" and "graphite-like stone" and the more popular etymology is just that, folk etymology!
>
> --
> james e. augerot 
>
> On Thu, 28 Aug 2008 lino59 at AMERITECH.NET wrote:
>
>   
>> There's an interesting ( to some? to me?) discussion of this etymology in
>> the last section of this article beginning with Показательна в
>> этом отношении этимология слова
>> карандашhttp://www.relga.rsu.ru/n37/rus37.htm:
>>
>> http://www.relga.rsu.ru/n37/rus37.htm
>>     
>   

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