Forgotten Paths: Etymology and the Allegorical Mindset

Abstract

Forgotten Paths: and the Allegorical Mindset. By Davide Del Bello. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 187. Illus. $64.95. This elegantly written, brilliantly conceived book provides a richly expansive definition of etymology and its relation allegory. That definition is based on the neoplatonic philosopher Proclus's [ca. 412-485] coinage of the term etymegoreia or allegorical etymology. As Del Bello notes, Proclus expands theprovinceof etymology from a study of word origins include both argumentation and hermeneutics: The fact is that etymegoreia treads the fuzzy, contested, liminal zone between words and things, and language, eternity and history, spirit and matter (p. 46). later Isidore of Seville [560-636], whose Etymologiae was perhaps the most popular and significant text appear the middle ages, also provides a definition of etymology which combines formal analysis with interpretation: Etymology is the origin of words, when the force of a word or name is determined through interpretation' (p. 105). Etymology, according Del Bello, proposes that we read allegory (diversiloquium) as the rhetorical analogue of a cognitive process whereby a person bundles or blends together several (diverse) aspects of experience into one model, script, or story (p. 157). In contrast, the nineteenth and twentiethcentury scientific etymologists or Neogrammarians equated etymology with the one-way, strictly chronological reconstructions of 'roots' (p. 5). Allegory or other speaking (diversiloquium) cites a meaning outside of the text, but that meaning is ultimately based on the words the text itself. Thus for Del Bello, facto, etymologies function as the linguistic pillars on which allegory builds its interpretative edifice (p. 108). Del Bello admits he is swimming against the stream of so-called scientific etymology, which reduces the discipline of etymology a formal, linear analysis of the origins of words, and ignores the historical and philosophical contexts of the words themselves, since these cannot be formally analyzed or accounted for. In effect, linguists are attempting to formalize all figurative (p. 162). This attitude is epitomized the German historian Ernst Robert Curtius's dismissal of medieval etymologies as foolish and insipid (p. xiii). Moreover, the semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (p. xv) renders the rhetorical and historical contexts of individual words inaccessible and frustrates any attempt explore the richness of the words themselves. In fact, linguistics erred in privileging form over meaning, and, precisely because of its 'scientific' thrust, may have made opaque, or limited, the cognitive scope of meaning by reducing it a series of formal features (p. 9). Del Bello inveighs against the current attempt on the part of linguists reduce etymology mere derivation of words: While acceptable from a linguistic viewpoint, this kind of etymology would more aptly be defined as an 'atomology/ for it cuts up and muddles the set of historical meanings and the constellation of rhetorical senses a word belongs ... (p. 163); . . linguistics cannot continue gloss over one aspect of its subject just because it eludes systematic formalization (p. 26). True etymology treats . . the symbolic, rhetorical, ideological, cognitive, and value-making aspects of human language that one-way scientism must disregard (p. 32). If we agTee that thought and speech are inseparably interwoven, both phy logenetically and ontogenetically, it must also be granted that an exclusively linguistic approach language offers only a partial view (p. …

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