Abstract This article challenges the widespread textbook claim that “etymology boasts a venerable history of its own” (Malkiel), which implies that the history of etymology predates that of linguistics. On the contrary, it is argued that etymology, defined as “the search for the relationships—formal and semantic — that link a word with another unit that historically precedes it and from which it derives” (Zamboni), is a scientific discipline with a much shorter history than (synchronic) linguistics, mathematics or physics. The reason is obvious: despite occasional affirmative answers to questions such as “Did the ancient Greeks and Romans do historical linguistics?”, historical linguistics as a scientific discipline dates back little more than two centuries, while any text/author from earlier periods has no place in the history of a modern scientific discipline comparable to that, for example, of Archimedes in the history of physics and geometry. With this in mind, it is proposed here to distinguish sharply an etymology 2 , i.e. scientific etymology, from its pre-modern precursors, indicated instead with the label etymology 1 . The latter, it is argued, has three features that distinguish it from etymology 2 : the ‘truth-seeking’, the ‘non-uniqueness’, and the ‘semantic’ bias. The ways in which these biases affect discussions about the origin of words of the type defined here as etymology 1 are illustrated by drawing on various texts and cultures, from Antiquity to the 18th century.
Michele Loporcaro (Thu,) studied this question.