Word Origins... and How We Know Them by Anatoly Liberman

Abstract

832 Reviews the role of the historian onto the viewer of privileged media. Pihlainen concludes that White's earlier, residual reliance on epistemological veracity isabandoned in this latest book in favour of a 'shift towards amore full-blown relativism' (p. 66). That analysis is further illuminated by Stanley Corkin and Phyllis Frus's reading of recent filmicconstructions of historical events through theprism of Figural Realism and by Lara Okihiro's invocation of White's construction of thehistorian as translator inher analysis of narratives treating thebombing ofHiroshima. It is,of course, Hayden White's own contribution, 'Historical Discourse and Liter ary Writing', thatwill attractmost readers to thevolume. White begins by outlining the complementary roles played by history and literature in identifyingand mapping real-world concerns, and sets out to answer the question 'what is the truth-value of figurative statements about the realworld and what kind of information does an analysis of figurative language in the historical document yield to us?' (p. 26). The focus of his analysis isPrimo Levi's Se questo eun uomo,which he describes as 'not so much a history as a privileged piece of historical evidence' (p. 3 I), before proceeding to 'concentrate on what kind of historical knowledge can be extracted fromLevi's text by a "literary" reading of it' (p. 27). It is unclear, however, what constituency the essay seeks to address; for literaryscholars itprovides no new contribution to the existing corpus ofLevi criticism, nor does itprovide additional insights forhistorians acquainted with the insightful and searching analysis of Levi's work by Holocaust historians such asDominick LaCapra. Elsewhere in thevolume, valuable contributions on the reception ofOttoman 'cam paign narratives' (Claire Norton) and the intersection between White's philosophy of history and the fictionalwritings of Paul Auster (Matti Hyvarien) and Norman Mailer (Markku Lehtimiki) lend coherence to a volume inevitably fraughtwith the diverging tensions inherent in thehistory/literature debate. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL RUTH GLYNN Word Origins ... and How We Know Them. By ANATOLY LIBERMAN. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. vii+312 PP. ?I4.99; $25. ISBN 978-O-I9-5I6I47-2. To summarize this book is to diminish it inmore than the obvious way-the revel is in the detail. Chapter i defines the pursuit of etymology, and Chapter 2 is about the development of the discipline, and about lay theorizing. Chapter 3 explores ono matopoeia, 'echoicness', and phonaesthemes, focused by an inspired simile: 'Words sharing an onomatopoeic combination of sounds are like children living in the same fosterhome at the same time: they form a close-knit group without being related to one another.' This introduces an ideawhose importance, characteristically, does not emerge till later:words can be etymologically related other than by sharing a recon structable ancestor form.But this cannot pay out until theNeogrammarian method has been introduced, which does not happen tillChapter I4. Chapter 4 ison sound symbolism and Chapter 5 on folk etymology. Readers anxious thatperipheral mate rial isbeing foregrounded will welcome thenearly lastwords ofChapter 4: 'themain objective is to perfect themechanisms by which [genetic] ties can be reconstructed'. But relief is deferred. Chapter 6 focuses on the ludic element inword-formation, and Chapter 7 is a real ragbag allegedly about infixation.We reach solider ground inChapters 8 and 9 about disguised compounds and reanalyses of various kinds, where well-understood processes of phonetic attrition and boundary-shifting are in troduced. Liberman snipes gently at theoretical linguistics (pp. 248-49), but language is not a purely historical phenomenon; it is embodied in real people and therefore needs describing with psycholinguistic plausibility, so the absence of a characteriza tion of some of the elements he introduces is troubling. MLR, I02.3, 2007 833 Chapter io covers words whose sources are proper nouns. InChapter i iLiberman presents coinages whose actual coiner isknown, with an interestingdiscussion of lil liputian at its core, but reminds us that even recent coinages may be obscure in this respect. Chapter I2 covers borrowing judiciously. It closes with a neat, and correct, observation that language and literature canonize theirpopular forms at the expense of earlier classical forms.Chapter I3 is a stocktaking. With Chapter 14begins the material with which other scholarsmight have opened. It is about sound-laws...