folkology

[William Ryan]

I find Natalie Kononenko's playful suggestion of 'folkology' almost 
attractive, even if it is a linguistic chimera - certainly more 
attractive than the very un-English sounding word 'folkloristics' (which 
logically should produce 'folkloristician' as the name for its 
practitioners). Incidentally, in my ignorance I had always assumed that 
'folkloristics' was a back-formation from 'Folkloristik' in German and 
Scandinavian languages, used only by non-English speakers at 
international conferences - but I find that not only does Wikipedia 
endorse it, but the current version of the Oxford English Dictionary has 
it; the first citation is:

    1950 tr. /Yu. M. Sokolov's Russian Folklore/ 3 At the present time,
    in accordance with the practice of European and Soviet scholars, the
    term 'folklore' is used to designate the material of study; to
    indicate the science which deals with this material, the term
    'folkloristics' is employed.

So the perpetrators were in fact Sokolov's translator, Catherine Ruth 
Smith (not, as far as I can discover, a folkloristician), and the 
Russian Translation Project of the American Council of Learned Societies 
who paid for the translation (Macmillan, New York, 1950). Whether the 
translation of Russian 'fol'kloristika' as 'folkloristics' constitutes a 
loan word from Russian into International English is an interesting 
point. None of the citations of the word in the OED article is British 
(two US, one Canadian, one an English-language journal of Yiddish 
folklore published in Holland). Is it standard North American 
'folkloristical' usage?

Will Ryan

nataliek at UALBERTA.CA wrote:
>  I can't resist.  I must take Will Ryan up on his suggestion, even
>  though it be only implied, and urge all fellow folklorists to become
>  folkologists, renaming our folkology in the process.  Thoms changed
>  the name of our field over 150 years ago.  Isn't it time for another
>  change?
>


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