---- By J. L. S.
KRAMER has propounded in a number of posts and comments to this Club that language indeed does NOT move in necessarily mysterious ways. Why, if there's selfishness and survival economy at the sub-personal level (the gene), and at the personal level, surely there could well be at the supra-personal level: lingo.
Consider his speculations on the etymology ("a mouthful" he says) of "misericordia":
He proposes an 'anthropological' theory to fit Grice's PERE (principle of economy of rational effort).
"The kindness of a society
can be measured by the ratio
of the lengths of its words
for "mercy" and "misery."
mercy
------
misery
in symbols.
"English stacks up pretty well, but the romantics, with their "misery-fixing" (or whatever "cordia" means) seem not have had to say the word often enough to have shortened it."
"Or maybe they were sadistic enough to make those who needed mercy really work for it, or make requesting mercy take so long, that one could deliver the coup de grace before one knew it was being asked.
Don't know. Would need further crosslinguistic data. But it does seem an intereseting hypothesis. And true, too!
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The point I was going to make is that it's interesting, of course, as Kramer does there, to consider diachrony. We need to consider the shortening of a word across generations. And there's where I was thinking of this survival-utility or teleological function for "be brief" as per Grice.
ReplyDeleteUtter short words.
---- In general, it works well. The other day, though, I met a girl who'd say, "No Beccy with me: It's Rebecca". The cheek.
But it works well with more aristocratic types (I love Becky!).
ReplyDeleteThe Chalmondeleys for example you can refer to as the Chumleys.
mercy
ReplyDelete------
misery
Indeed, with
anything
-----------
misericordia
nothing seems to beat the romantics. In my comment in "Riddle of the Sphynx" I do note that the 'cordia' is totally otiose:
"Have a miserable heart" surely can be shortened to "have a miserable".
Evita, in Argentina, was often referred to as
the mother of the mercy
mater misericordiae
-- This was taken up by Tim Rice in his "History of the Argentina for the West End". It was actually a motet for the Virgin Mary.