folkloristics

[nataliek at UALBERTA.CA]

I will venture to distract everyone from the gerunds discussion and  
answer Will Ryan's question about folkloristics.  Indeed, this has  
become a widely accepted term.  The textbook I use in my undergraduate  
intro. course is called Folkloristics and it is a history of the  
discipline by Jones and Georges.  Is it a Russian borrowing of sorts -  
I doubt it, but it is a curious choice.  When I started in the field,  
folklore was both the academic discipline and the stuff that this  
discipline studied.  But then again, the definition of the stuff that  
we study has changed a great deal.  There has been a lot of discipline  
creep - or cross-discipline bleed.  What I would never have called a  
narrative at one point, at least not a folk narrative, is now the  
primary object of study.  But that is a matter for another time.

Natalie K.

Quoting William Ryan <wfr at SAS.AC.UK>:

> 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
>
>

Natalie Kononenko
Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography
University of Alberta
Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
200 Arts Building
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E6
Phone: 780-492-6810
Web: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/

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