Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 281
English Latin
dilapidated lapis ‘stone’
eradicate radix ‘root’
sinister sinister ‘left’
virtue vir ‘man’
From the origin of dilapidated it might be thought that it referred only to stone structures,
eradicate only to roots, sinister to left-handed people, and virtue only to men.
Words, then, do not have immutable meanings that exist apart from context. They tend
to wander away from earlier meanings and their semantic values are not necessarily clear
from historical knowledge of the word.
Changes in the material culture, sometimes called referent change have an effect on
the meaning of a word as is the case of the English word pen, which once meant ‘feather’
from an even earlier pet ‘to fly’. This name was appropriated when quills were used for
writing but remained when pens were no longer feathers. Similarly, the word paper is no
longer associated with the papyrus plant of its origin.
SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF
LANGUAGE CHANGE
Language change often comes about through the social phenomena of taboos, metaphor,
and folk etymologies. The avoidance of particular words for social reasons seems to
occur in all languages and euphemisms arise in their place. For instance, instead of dies
one may use the expression passes away, which seems less severe and more sympathetic.
Or, one goes to the bathroom instead of the toilet, but does not expect to take a bath; even
dogs and cats may go to the bathroom in North America. Elderly people are senior
citizens and the poor are underprivileged. Like all social phenomena, taboos change with
time and viewpoint. In Victorian England the use of the word leg was considered
indiscreet, even when referring to a piano.
Taboos may even cause the loss of a word, as in the classical Indo-European case of
the word for ‘bear’. A comparison of this word in various Indo-European languages
yields:
Latin ursus Old Church Slavonic medvedi
Greek arktos English bear
Sanskrit German Bär
The presumed Indo-European ancestor of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit was *arktos.
Avoidance of the term is thought to have occurred in the northern Indo-European regions,
where the bear was prevalent, and another name, (employed, perhaps, not to offend it,
was substituted in the form of *ber- ‘brown’, that is, ‘the brown one’. In Slavic the name