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Article published In: Historiographia Linguistica
Vol. 11:1/2 (1984) ► pp.325–347

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Ramón Menéndez Pidal as Etymologist

 | University of California, Berkeley
Published online: 1 January 1984
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.11.1-2.15mal
Summary
Like most Romance scholars of his generation, Ramón Menéndez Pidal was an accomplished etymologist. In most instances, his etymological verdicts enter into broader historico-grammatical, dialectological, and narrowly philological investigations, from which they can be laboriously distilled. Nevertheless, one also discovers exercises, of varying length, in ‘pure etymology’. The most important, among these, are (a) a string of etymological notes w>hich appeared as a single article in a French journal, in 1900; (b) the book-length glossary included in his monumental edition of the Cantar de Mio Cid (1908–11); (c) the extended review article (1920) devoted to the original edition of W. Meyer-Lübke’s Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch; and (d) a major section of the Orígenes del español – the book that marks the author’s summit in matters of linguistic analysis and betrays a thoroughly personal style. The material subjected to assessment shows the major progress achieved by the author in a quarter-century of continued growth.
Résumé
Comme la plupart des romanistes de sa génération, Ramón Menéndez Pidal fut un étymologiste accompli. Dans la plupart des cas, ses solutions étymologiques s’intègrent dans des recherches plus vastes, d’ordre historico-grammatical, dialectologique et directement philologique, d’où il est difficile de les extraire séparément. Cependant, on découvre aussi, de longueur très diverse, des ‘exercices de pure étymologie’. Les plus importantes en sont (a) une série de notes étymologiques, parue en article dans une revue française en 1900; (b) le glossaire, aussi long qu’un ouvrage, que contient son édition monumentale du Cantar de Mio Cid (1908–1911); (c) l’ample article – compte rendu consacré à la première édition du Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch de W. Meyer-Lübke; et (d) une partie importante des Orígenes del español, ouvrage qui constitue le sommet de l’œuvre du chercheur en matière d’analyse linguistique et révèle un style tout à fait personnel. Les matériaux évalués montrent le procès capital accompli par l’auteur en un quart de siècle de croissance ininterrompue.
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Malkiel, Yakov
1992. Old and new thoughts about the configuration of the Romance language family. In Reconstructing Languages and Cultures, ► pp. 73 ff. DOI logo

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