{"id":5768,"date":"2011-07-01T21:58:47","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T10:58:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/?p=5768"},"modified":"2011-07-01T21:58:47","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T10:58:47","slug":"history-in-the-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2011\/07\/history-in-the-making\/","title":{"rendered":"History in the making"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since 2005 I have been teaching a one Term introductory course each year on Historical Linguistics at SOAS and enjoying it a lot. The students especially like the coverage of semantic change, loanwords, and borrowing and language contact. One of the (standard) topics in this area that I cover is so-called <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Folk_etymology\">folk etymology<\/a> and typically refer to the text book examples like &#8216;day&#8217;s eye&#8217; for &#8216;daisy&#8217;, or &#8216;cockroach&#8217; that was borrowed from Spanish <i>cucaracha<\/i> and given a pseudo-etymology in English.<\/p>\n<p>Well today at 7:15pm on ABC news radio I heard a great example that I&#8217;d never come across before and will definitely use when I teach the course again. A commentator said:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;The current strength of the Australian dollar it&#8217;s all well for investment in the manufacturing sector.&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It took me a minute or so to parse this and figure it out, but clearly what we have is a folk etymology of &#8220;it&#8217;s all well&#8221; in place of <b>augurs well<\/b>. As the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thefreedictionary.com\/augur\">Free Dictionary<\/a> indicates, this is the intransitive verb use of <b>augur<\/b> meaning &#8220;to be a sign or omen&#8221;; the word form entered Middle English from Latin where it meant &#8220;one of a group of ancient Roman religious officials who foretold events by observing and interpreting signs and omens&#8221;. Wicked innit?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since 2005 I have been teaching a one Term introductory course each year on Historical Linguistics at SOAS and enjoying it a lot. The students especially like the coverage of semantic change, loanwords, and borrowing and language contact. One of the (standard) topics in this area that I cover is so-called folk etymology and typically &#8230; <a title=\"History in the making\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2011\/07\/history-in-the-making\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about History in the making\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5768"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5794,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5768\/revisions\/5794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}