"Etymological" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nevertheless, the etymological view of every word of foreign origin is, not that it is put together in England, but that it is brought whole from the language to which it is vernacular. Now no derived word can be brought whole from a language unless, in that language, ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... Hellene, the Latin, the Slav, and the Indo-Iranian were known, to the existence of the family, with the mother occupying a high and honourable place, if not indeed the highest place of all. What the etymological meaning was, of the primitive Aryan word from which our mother is descended, is uncertain. It seems, however, to be a noun derived, with the agent-suffix -t-r, from the root ma, "to measure." Skeat thinks the word meant originally "manager, regulator ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... remarks, the word isle is not mentioned. And why? Simply because it has no immediate etymological connexion with the word island, being merely the French word naturalised. The word isle is a simple, the word island a compound term. It is surely a fruitless task (as it certainly is unnecessary for ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... think, to show that 'endless' and eternal are not convertible terms, for the special reason that the latter is significant of time as being derived from [oe]tas, whereas the other has per se no necessary relation to time. (For the same etymological reason I consider 'eternal' to be preferable to 'ever-lasting.') I cannot forbear adverting here to a serious misstatement, as it seems to me, in Mr. Churton's letter in the Guardian of December 12 (p. 1714). He says that the teaching of Holy Scripture ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... that to speak of roots as mere abstractions, as the result of grammatical theory, is self-contradictory. Roots which never had any real or historical existence may have been invented both in modern and ancient collections or Dhtup{t}has; but that is simply the fault of our etymological analysis, and in no way affects the fact, that the Aryan, like all other languages we know, began with roots. We may doubt the legitimacy of certain chemical elements, but not the reality of chemical elements in general. Language, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... fugitives, the rest escaping back to Bridgwater. Our readers will judge whether such a skirmish required a long preliminary description of the surrounding country. Mr. Macaulay might just as usefully have described the plain of Troy. Indeed at the close of his long topographical and etymological narrative Mr. Macaulay has the tardy candour ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... to connect words with their roots, and at the same time to caution him against supposing that, because he knows the roots of a word, he necessarily knows the meaning of the word itself. Exercises are interspersed throughout this Part which can be worked out with, or without, an English Etymological Dictionary,[44] as the nature of the case may require. The exercises have not been selected at random; many of them have been subjected to the practical test of experience, and have ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... Buttmann, Lexil. p. 85, comes to the conclusion that "we must include [Greek: athrotazein] among the forms of [Greek: amartano], whose etymological connections, as long as we are ignorant of them, we can ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... confined to Professor March. Nearly all of the advocates of this special "reform" assume the prerogative of determining who are and who are not "scholars." In the same paper the professor says: "The scholars proper have, in truth, lost all patience with the etymological objection. 'Save us from such champions!' says Professor Whitney: 'they may be allowed to speak for themselves, since they know best their own infirmity of back and need of braces: the rest of the guild, however, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... gives a variety of derivations, quoted from Pliny, Jamblichus, Epiphanius, and Origen; all of which are much more satisfactory as they regard the position of a certain town in the Land of Gilead, than as they convey any precise ideas as to its etymological import. After the Romans conquered Judea, the country beyond the Jordan became one of their favourite colonies; to which, from the circumstance of its containing ten cities, they gave the name of Decapolis, an appellation recognised by St. Mark in the seventh chapter of his Gospel. Geraza, ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... who essay to follow in his steps, and it is not without use to point them out instead of ignoring or expunging them. Thus, when the Archbishop falls into the error (venial when he wrote) of assuming an etymological connexion between certain words which have a specious air of kinship—such as 'care' and 'cura,' 'bloom' and 'blossom,' 'ghastly' and 'ghostly,' 'brat' and 'brood,' 'slow' and 'slough'—he makes just the mistakes which we would be tempted to make ourselves had not Professor Skeat ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... Schlegel, never seemed to divine that tragedy and comedy sprout from one and the same root, and that the former absolutely cannot unfold in all its greatness if the latter remains behind it. Confining the conception of comedy to the narrow etymological meaning of its name, and inferring the intrinsic impossibility of the poem from the accidental lack of a poet, we have imagined that we could not have a comedy, when on the contrary we, precisely, should and ought to have the very ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... The etymological meaning of Rokuro-Kubi can scarcely be indicated by any English rendering. The term rokuro is indifferently used to designate many revolving objects—objects as dissimilar as a pulley, a capstan, a windlass, ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... derived from certain dialectic forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the name is no more derived from anti and monachus than it is from anti and monos (opposed to single existence), another fictitious derivation that has been suggested, and one whose etymological value is supposed to consist in the fact that antimony is practically never found ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh |
