[Ads-l] Antedating of "Folk-Etymology"

[Ben Zimmer]

The 1874 article ("Slavonic Literary History") is here -- "folk-etymology"
is indeed given as a calque of German "Volksetymologie":

https://books.google.com/books?id=cNc9AQAAIAAJ&pg=PA675

The German term dates to 1852, from Ernst Förstemann's article "Ueber
Deutsche volksetymologie."

--bgz


On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 11:14 AM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> Nice, Fred.  Out of curiosity, which I assume isn’t solely mine, could you
> supply enough of the context to clarify the examples the author had in mind
> here?  I seem to recall that “folk(-)etymology” is a calque from the
> German, but it would still be interesting to know the earliest cited
> examples of the phenomenon in an English-language context.
>
> LH
>
> > On Sep 7, 2020, at 8:21 AM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
> >
> > folk-etymology (OED 1883)
> >
> > 1874 _ Saturday Review_ 21 Nov. 675 (ProQuest)  According to a similar
> kind of "folk-etymology" many names of places have been wrongly referred to
> alien sources.
> >
> >
>

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