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Download I hold in my hot little hands a brand new copy of Anatoly Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology. Today I’m going to use the word dwarf as a kind of vehicle to describe what I see between this book’s covers. To begin with let me read to you the full etymology for dwarf as reported in the American Heritage Dictionary: [from] Middle English dwerf, from Old English dweorh That’s it, the whole entry. Compare this with Anatoly Liberman’s information which I estimate to run in excess of 12,000 words of text. I think it’s safe to say that Professor Liberman’s treatment of this word dwarfs the etymologies in other dictionaries. I’ll get to what he has to say in a moment, but first I want to tell you about the philosophy behind this dictionary of English etymology. Not all dictionaries are particularly strong on etymology and part of the reason is that etymology takes up valuable space on the page where not all dictionary buyers are as keen on the subject as you and I might be. Also, even though the word etymology means “the true sense of words,” in practice there is often a lot of opinion involved in what the true history of a word might be. For this reason, as Professor Liberman explains, the compilers of even strong English etymology dictionaries have tended to include etymologies where they themselves were convinced by the research and arguments of experts. But all too often felt justified in claiming an etymology was unknown when there was no clear winner among a host of theories on a word’s background. The result is, that for you and me who don’t know multiple languages alive and dead, we have no idea what the competing theories might have been. Even when the dictionary editor does believe one line of thinking, we have no way of knowing why he or she believes that. Anatoly Liberman has taken a different approach. He feels that what we have in English, as far as etymology dictionaries go, lags far behind those of many other languages because past efforts have not brought together and openly sifted-through the various theories and pieces of evidence. Because he’s been willing to do so, each entry in his dictionary is comparatively huge. Consequently, when finished his dictionary will also be a rather ponderous size. But it isn’t finished yet. The book that I cradle in my arms is subtitled An Introduction because in it Professor Liberman treats a total of fewer than 60 words. That’s not very many by most dictionary standards. You might even say that it’s a bit of a dwarf of a dictionary that way. In this, and in my earlier mention, I’ve used the word dwarf to mean something small. That’s certainly its current meaning, and in fact the Oxford English Dictionary first cites the word back in the year 700 as meaning a person of less than normal dimensions. But Professor Liberman has taken a long view and applied his best judgment to the scraps of evidence that trail back into pre-history and come up with the idea that dwarf didn’t always mean small. In fact, in some ways in an ancient world view, dwarves were seen on a par with the gods. What etymology my usual dictionaries do have on dwarf agrees with him that it is an ancient Germanic word. He feels that the evidence points further back to a time when the mythical beings that came to be dwarves were conceived to be helpers to the gods and of normal stature. Our current mythology associates dwarves with caves and Professor Liberman suggests that this may be because one of the earlier forms of the word dwarf sounded a lot like the then contemporary Germanic word for “mountain.” Imagining a race of beings that lived in caves in the mountains would support their being of a smaller scale. As I said, his entry for the word dwarf goes on for many pages and I can’t cover it all here. What’s more, it isn’t always easy going. There’s some deeply academic content that sometimes takes a will to get through. But Professor Liberman has tried to make it easy. He opens the book

Episode 2 - Dwarf

Download I don’t know if you’ve heard of Long John Baldry but he was a musician who palled around with Elton John and Rod Stewart. One of Long John’s songs is Everything Stops for Tea. Therein he claims Every nation in creation has its favorite drink France is famous for its wine, it’s beer in Germany Turkey has its coffee and they serve it blacker than ink Russians go for vodka and England loves its tea Oh, the factory may be roaring With a boom-a-lacka, zoom-a-lacka, wee But there isn’t any roar when the clock strikes four Everything stops for tea This little ditty feeds off of and reinforces the image of a cup of tea being a very British thing to enjoy. Long John says it’s coffee in Turkey but you might be surprised to learn that people were drinking coffee in England for quite a while before anyone there had ever heard of tea. Actually both coffee and tea show up in the written record in the same year—1598—and in the same document, but tea came out as chaa and didn’t turn up again as tea until 1655, forty years after that other English icon—Shakespeare—was six feet under. That document was something called John Huighen Van Linschoten, his Discours of Voyages into the East and West Indies. John Huighen Van Linschoten was Dutch and the Dutch were big into sailing around discovering things and then becoming middlemen selling those things here and there around the world. And so it was that Dutch traders to Malay or Formosa brought back the Amoy dialect word tea to Europe—or something like tea—while Mandarin Chinese chai found its way to Europe courtesy of Portuguese traders; Arabs via the silk route; and overland to Russia. Tea drinking in England took a while to get going. It was 1660 when Samuel Pepys reported tasting the stuff for the first time. So tea changed its pronunciation back in the Far East before Europeans discovered it and it’s also a good example of how pronunciation change continues. While Long John Baldry rhymed tea with wee and Germany, The American Heritage Dictionary offers up a passage by Alexander Pope that shows the pronunciation of tea back in 1714 as “tay,” rhyming with obey.

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Episode 2 - Dwarf

Episode 1 - Tea