salary is defined by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as "fixed compensation for services, paid to a person on a regular basis. "Its etymology can be traced back 2,000 years to sal, the Latin word for salt.
If a word's etymology is not the same as its definition, why should we care at all about word histories? Well, for one thing, understanding how words have developed can teach us a great deal about our cultural history. In addition, studying the histories of familiar words can help us to deduce the meanings of unfamiliar words, thereby enriching our vocabularies. Finally, word stories are often both entertaining and thought provoking. As any youngster can tell you, words are fun.
2. Folk etymology as a productive force
Folk etymology is particularly important because it can result in the modification of a word or phrase by analogy with the erroneous etymology which is popularly believed to be true and supposed to be thus 'restored'. In such cases, 'folk etymology 'is the trigger which causes the process of linguistic analogy by which a word or phrase changes because of a popularly-held etymology, or misunderstanding of the history of a word or phrase. Here the term 'folk etymology 'is also used (originally as a shorthand) to refer to the change itself, and knowledge of the popular etymology is indispensable for the (more complex) true etymology of the resulting 'hybridized' word.
Other misconceptions which leave the word unchanged may of course be ignored, but are generally not called popular etymology. The question of whether the resulting usage is "correct" or "incorrect" depends on one's notion of correctness and is in any case distinct from the question of whether a given etymology is correct.
Until academic linguistics developed the comparative study of philology and the development of the laws underlying phonetic changes, the derivation of words was a matter mostly of guess-work, sometimes right but more often wrong, based on superficial resemblances of form and the like. This popular etymology has had a powerful influence on the forms which words take (eg crawfish or crayfish, from the French crevis, modern crevisse, or sand-blind, from samblind, i.e. semi-, half-blind), and has frequently been the occasion of homonyms resulting from different etymologies for what appears a single word, with the original meaning (s) reflecting the true etymology and the new meaning (s) reflecting the 'incorrect' popular etymology.
The term "folk etymology", as referring both to erroneous beliefs about derivation and the consequent changes to words, is derived from the German Volksetymologie. Similar terms are found in other languages, e.g. Volksetymologie itself in Danish and Dutch, Afrikaans Volksetimologie, Swedish Folketymologi, and full parallels in non-Germanic languages, eg French Г‰tymologie populaire, Hungarian NГ©petimolГіgia; an example of an alternative name is Italian Pseudoetimologia.
3. Instances of word change by folk etymology
In linguistic change caused by folk etymology, the form of a word changes so that it better matches its popular rationalisation. For example:
Old English sam-blind ("semi-blind" or "half-blind") became sand-blind (as if "blinded by the sand") when people were no longer able to make sense of the element sam ("half"). p> Old English bryd-guma ("bride-man") became bridegroom after the Old English word guma fell out of use and made the compound semantically obscure. p> The silent s in island is a result of folk etymology. The word, which derives from an Old English compound of Д«eg = "island", was erroneously believed to be related to "isle", which came via Old French from Latin insula ("island"). p> More recent examples:
French (E) crevisse (likely from Germanic krebiz) which became the English crayfish. p> asparagus, which in England became sparrow-grass. p> cater-corner became kitty-corner or catty-corner when the original meaning of cater ("Four") had become obsolete. p> Other changes due to folk etymology include:
buttonhole from buttonhold (originally a loop of string that held a button down)
Charterhouse from Chartreux
hangnail from agnail
penthouse from pentice
sweetheart from sweetard (the same suffix as in dullard and dotard)
shamefaced from shamefast ("caught in shame")
chaise lounge from chaise longue ("long chair")
straight-laced from strait-laced
When a back-formation rests on a misunderstanding of the morphology of the original word, it may be regarded as a kind of folk etymology.
In heraldry, a rebus coat-of-arms (which expresses a name by one or more elements only significant by virtue of the supposed etymology) may reinforce a folk etymology ...
