Реферат: Folk etymology
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 (e.g. 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, e.g. French Étymologie populaire, Hungarian Népetimológia; 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").
Old English bryd-guma ("bride-man") became bridegroom after the Old English word guma fell out of use and made the compound semantically obscure.
The silent s in island is a result of folk etymology. The word, which derives from an Old English compound of īeg = "island", was erroneously believed to be related to "isle", which came via Old French from Latin insula ("island").
More recent examples:
French (e)crevisse (likely from Germanic krebiz) which became the English crayfish.
asparagus, which in England became sparrow-grass.
cater-corner became kitty-corner or catty-corner when the original meaning of cater ("four") had become obsolete.
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 for a noun proper, usually of a place.
The same process sometimes influences the spelling of proper names. The name Antony/Anthony is often spelled with an "h" because of the Elizabethan belief that it is derived from Greek ανθος (flower). In fact it is a Roman family name, probably meaning something like "ancient".
4. Other languages
See the following articles that discuss folk etymologies for their subjects:
belfry (architecture)
blunderbuss
Brass monkey