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- Title
„Denn die Götter lieben das Verborgene": Paroka-Etymologien als Zeichen einer gespaltenen Realität.
- Authors
Corno, Stefano
- Abstract
Is etymology the study of the phonetic content or rather the semantic value of a word? Is the aim of etymology the search of the linguistic origin of a word or rather the way to describe the features of a word? It is obvious to everybody that etymology had a different purpose in Antiquity than in modern linguistic research. Against this backdrop, in this article a special way of etymologizing which can be read in ancient Brahmanic texts is taken into consideration. This kind of explanation starts from the premise that the right sense of a word is not known to mankind, but it is a secret that the gods don't want to share with them. The texts say that the gods modified some words so that humans cannot understand their real meaning. The etymology of these words is paroka, which can be translated as "cryptic", "mysterious", "not immediately understandable" and implies a double levels of linguistic knowledge: the language of the gods, pure and true, and the human language, which is fallacious.
- Subjects
ETYMOLOGY; HUMAN beings; VOCABULARY; LANGUAGE &; languages; EXPLANATION
- Publication
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 2022, Vol 32, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0939-2815
- Publication type
Article