关注公众号，回复“进群”进经济学人精读打卡群。
Plenty of words have no clear origin
很多英语单词的词源并不明确
A new book investigating strange etymologies reads like a detective story
一本探究奇怪词源的新书，读起来像一部侦探小说
July 18th 2024
Origin Uncertain: Unravelling the Mysteries of Etymology.By Anatoly Liberman. Oxford University Press; 344 pages; $29.99 and £22.99
MANY WORDS are puzzles themselves. “Conundrum” confounds scholars; “bamboozle” beguiles them. Anatoly Liberman, an etymologist at the University of Minnesota, explains why in “Origin Uncertain”, a delightful romp through the annals of words’ origins.
许多单词本身就是谜团。“Conundrum”这个词使学者们困惑不已；“bamboozle”更是难住了他们。明尼苏达大学词源学家Anatoly Liberman在《Origin Uncertain》中解释了这种现象，《Origin Uncertain》这本书带领读者畅游在词源的历史长河中。
Compiled from some 20 years of blogs he wrote for Oxford University Press, “Origin Uncertain” takes a broadly thematic approach. He covers words that are “bizarre, misbegotten and born by mistake”, such as punk, spunk and funk, and terms with “troublesome phonetics”, including the related words sneak, snack and snuck.
《Origin Uncertain》汇编了作者为牛津大学出版社撰写的大约20年的博客内容，并采用了广泛的主题方法。他探讨了一些“奇异、误导和误生”的词语，如punk、spunk和funk，以及一些“发音麻烦”的单词，包括形近词sneak、snack和snuck。
All of this will delight logophiles. The book may also appeal to true-crime fans; it reads like a detective story. The hunt for the Middle English word “henchman”, for example, has “villains and casualties at every step”. It first surfaced in 1360; etymologists thought it meant “horseman”, from hengst, an Old Germanic word for “stallion”. Yet hengst had died out in English a century earlier, making this coinage unlikely. The word eventually became hencheman, before vanishing in the 17th century. Walter Scott, a poet, revived it some 200 years later, bestowing the definition “one who is always at his master’s haunch”. This bears some resemblance to its meaning today, as an unscrupulous or corrupt crony.
所有这些都会让语言爱好者感到愉悦。这本书也可能吸引探案故事的粉丝；它读起来像一部侦探小说。例如，对中古英语词汇“henchman”的词源追寻中，“每一步都有困难和挫折”。这个词首次出现于1360年；词源学家原认为它的意思是“骑士”，源自古日耳曼语中表示“种马”的词“hengst”。然而，在英语中“hengst”已在一个世纪前消失，导致这种推断不太可能。这个词最终演变为“hencheman”，然后在17世纪消失。两百年后，诗人Walter Scott重新使用了这个词，将其定义为“总是在主人身边的人”。这在某种程度上与这个词在今天的含义相似，即不道德或腐败的亲信。
Mr Liberman does not manage to prove the true origins of “henchman”, concluding that the “criminal” leaves the “investigators partly at bay”. Some readers may grow tired of the unsolvable linguistic riddles in this book. Yet they demonstrate the capricious nature of vocabulary. So many words have quietly fallen out of fashion; others have survived only because famous writers such asShakespeare used them.
Liberman先生并未能证明“henchman”真正的起源，而是得出结论称这个怪词像“罪犯”一样，使“调查人员有些束手无策”。一些读者可能会对这本书中无法解决的语言谜题感到厌倦。然而，这些谜题恰恰展示了词汇的反复无常。许多词语悄然退出了潮流，而其他一些词语之所以存活下来，仅仅是因为像莎士比亚这样的著名作家使用过。
In few cases is the invention of a word recorded. William Thoms, a 19th-century British writer, coined the term “folklore” (“the lore of the people”) in a letter in 1846. As “folklore” became popular, however, Thoms had to keep reminding readers that he came up with it. If a word “finds approval by the community”, Mr Liberman explains, “it survives, and the inventor’s name is soon forgotten”. The origins of bamboozle will continue to bamboozle, a fact that would doubtless have delighted its unremembered creator.■
很少有英语单词发明被记录下来的情况。19世纪英国作家William Thoms在1846年的一封信中创造了“folklore”（“人民的传说”）这个术语。然而，随着“folklore”的流行，Thoms不得不一再提醒读者他创造这个词的初衷。Liberman先生解释道，如果一个词“得到了社会的认可”，“它就会存活下来，而发明者的名字很快被人遗忘”。
