Is it possible to induce a paradigm shift
through a dictionary? The experience of the
Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman (DÉRom)
Éva Buchi
ATILF (CNRS & Université de Lorraine)
2nd EMLex Colloquium on Lexicography
Budapest, January 29 2015
www.atilf.fr/perso/buchi
Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
At the end of the 19th century
Famous controversy about the respective place of
phonetics and semantics in (Romance) etymology
Antoine Thomas (1857–1935)
University of Paris-Sorbonne
Hugo Schuchardt
(1842–1927)
University of Graz
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Outcome: phonetics and semantics are equally
important for etymological work
Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
For more than a hundred years
“Life has been a long quiet river” (French film by
Étienne Chatiliez from 1988) for Romance
etymologists: general consensus about
methodology of etymology of inherited
lexicon
Leading paradigm elsewhere
= comparative reconstruction
(bottom-up)
Lexeme x
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Protolexeme
Lexeme y
Lexeme z
Romance languages: Latin (top-down)
Latin HĔRBA ‘grass’ > Romanian iarbă,
French herbe, Portuguese erva
Strong idiosyncrasy!
Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
September 7 2007
Paper by Wolfgang Schweickard (Saarland
University) and Éva Buchi at the 25th
International Conference on Romance
Linguistics and Philology (Innsbruck)
announcing the launching of
Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman
(DÉRom), based on comparative
reconstruction
Cast a stone in the stagnant waters of
Romance linguistics
Since then, there are two competing
approaches to Romance etymology
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Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
Strong opposition from renowned Romanists
Alberto Varvaro (1934–2014)
University of Naples
Former president and honorary member of
Society of Romance Linguistics
Author of the etymological dictionary of Sardinian
(1) Revue de linguistique romane 75 (2011): 297-304
(2) Answer Buchi & Schweickard: 75 (2011): 305-312
(3) 75 (2011): 623-627
(4) Answer Buchi & Schweickard: 75 (2011): 628-635
“To apply to the case of Latin and the Romance languages the
methodology which imposes itself (for factual reasons, not by
our choice) in the case of Indo-European and the prehistoric
Indo-European languages would be like studying the history of
Napoleonic France by the methods normally applied to prehistory.”
Fighting a “totally selfless battle for the defense of a glorious
5 tradition” (Vàrvaro 2011: 626)
Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
More criticism
Johannes Kramer (1946–)
University of Trier
Author of the etymological dictionary of Ladin
“The new Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman […] is based on ‘ProtoRomance’ etyma (i.e. words reconstructed from Romance on the basis of
the historical-comparative method), which only incidentally have
someting to do with what we traditionnally mean by an etymon, namely a
word pertaining to the Latin language continuum which ideally is
documented in written form. […] by doing so, one dismisses as secondrate the etymon in the true sense, i.e. the element which really existed in
one of Latin’s manifestations, presented a real semantic spectrum and a
real integration in the real-linguistic environment and work within
Romance linguistics only with bloodless reconstructed etyma.”
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Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
And it just got better and better…
Frankwalt Möhren (1942–)
University of Heidelberg
Former head of the etymological dictionary
of Old French
“Reconstructions […] have to coincide with attested facts […],
otherwise they cannot be considered scientific.”
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Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
More of the same
Germà Colón (1928–)
University of Basel
Leading scholar in Romance and Catalan
lexicography
“Presenting [the etyma] in the alphabet of the IPA seems to me
unfortunate in a work whose title contains the adjective Romance.
Moreover, this could well repel cultivated readers who are not
Romanists. At least, the lemma should be presented in the form of
the latin etymon.”
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Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
Vast membership mouvement
From a handfull of founding members to currently 54 researchers
from 15 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech
Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Macedonia, Poland, Portugal,
Romania, Russian Federation, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland)
+Brazil, Japan and USA
Including:
– Jean-Pierre Chambon (University of Paris-Sorbonne) and Pierre Swiggers
(University of Leuven), the leading theorists in Romance etymology
– Max Pfister (Saarland University), former head of the Lessico
Etymologico Italiano (LEI)
– Jean-Paul Chauveau and Yan Greub (ATILF, Nancy), former and current
heads of the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (FEW)
– Johannes Kramer (despite his strong reservations!)
– Steven N. Dworkin (University of Michigan)
– Rosario Coluccia (University of Salento)
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The DÉRom team
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Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
Summer schools attracted young scholars
Two Summer Schools
in Romance Etymology
(2010 and 2014)
introduced
79 participants
from 18 countries
to comparative
reconstruction
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Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
Funding went also well
ANR (Agence nationale de la recherche) and DFG (Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft) 670 000 € over 6 years
One anonymous expert:
“What adds additional value to the project is the fact that the team
assembled by Buchi and Schweickard decided not to simply update
Meyer-Lübke’s classic dictionary, but to adopt at the same time a new
methodological perspective, that of reconstruction and
comparative grammar, quite uncommon in Romance philology due to
the availability of an abundance of written sources for the common
ancestor, Latin.”
Other funding:
– ATILF
– Lorraine region
– Université de Lorraine
– Agence universitaire de la Francophonie
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Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
Results
Web site: http://www.atilf.fr/DERom (dictionary itself,
composition of the team, word list, current events, history,
bibliography, list of associated publications, theses, etymology and
secondary education; back-office part for members [editorial help])
62 published papers (mostly in French; also in Asturian, Catalan,
English, German, Italian, Portughese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish)
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DÉRom 1 = Buchi, Éva & Schweickard, Wolfgang (ed.)
(2014): Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman (DÉRom).
Genèse, méthodes et résultats, Berlin, De Gruyter, 723
pages:
– theoretical part: methods; phonologic, inflectional,
derivational, semantic reconstruction; data processing;
internal revision; paradigm discussion; beyond the DÉRom
– lexicographic part: selection of entries; bibliography;
list of abbreviations.
Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
Benefits of the new paradigm?
Example: etymology of French faim ‘hunger’ and its cognates
established within the framework of an EMLex class
3rd semester: “Analyse lexicologique”, taught by
Alain Polguère and Éva Buchi
2011/2012: half of the group, including
Candice, compiled entries like faim ‘hunger’
and soif ‘thirst’ of the Réseau Lexical du
Français (RLF)
The other half, including Bianca and
Carmen, compiled the DÉRom-entry
dedicated to the etymon of faim
14 Bianca, Carmen, and Candice (EMLex diploma award ceremony 2012)
Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
Findings
Traditional
etymology
(Latin-based)
DÉRom’s etymology
(reconstructed)
Signifier
fames
*/'ɸamen/
[because of Sardinian famen]
Signified
‘hunger’
‘hunger; starvation; desire’
[widely attested]
Syntactic properties
f.n.
n.n.
[1. Proto-Romance nouns
ending in */-'amen/ are
neuter; 2. the plural
*/'ɸamin-a/ can be
reconstructed; 3. a neuter (=
recessive gender) explains
particularly well secondary
masculines and feminines]
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Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
About these secondary masculine and feminine protolexemes
Common ProtoRomance
*/'ɸamen/ n.n.
Proto-Sardinian
*/'ɸamen/ m.n. (<
Sardinian famen)
Continental Proto-Rom.
*/'ɸam-e/ f.n. (< Italian
fame, Port. fome etc.)
Proto-Romanian
*/'ɸamit-e/ f.n. (<
Romanian foamete)
Secondary protolexemes = result of
remorphologisations which
integrated the noun in various
inflectional types
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Italo-Western Proto-R.
*/ɸa'min-a/ f.n. (<
French famine etc.)
Italo-Western Proto-R.
*/'ɸamin-e/ f.n. (<
Spanish hambre etc.)
Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
Forthcoming paper
Buchi, Éva, González Martín, Carmen, Mertens, Bianca &
Schlienger, Claire (in press): “L’étymologie de FAIM et de
FAMINE revue dans le cadre du DÉRom”, Le français
moderne.
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Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
Etymological declination
Results from written Latin-oriented etymology (fames
f.n. ‘hunger’) and from etymology based on
comparative reconstruction (*/'ɸamen/ n.n. ‘hunger;
starvation; desire’) differ (a little), in the same way
magnetic north and true north are not exactly the same
Angle between magnetic north and true
north = magnetic declination
Etymological declination = difference
between the results of Latin-oriented
etymology and etymology based on
comparative reconstruction
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Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
To conclude
Is it possible to induce a paradigme shift through a dictionary?
DÉRom = breaker wave
phenomenon:
– new paradigm yields
interesting results;
– strongly international
(more than 80 talks in 12
languages);
– accent on training of
young scholars
Lexicography is definitely a very powerful tool for advancing
the borders of knowledge!
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