Présentation de l'éditeur
Seybral years ago the study of the private and public documents of the Middle A ges, which I consulted for the etymology of difficult words, revealed to me a strange fact: the vast majority of words treated by the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic philologists had been studied with an utter disregard of documentary evidence. At every turn the facts belied the scientific deductions. Neither chronology nor phonetics were approximately correct in any given case. The starred forms never corresponded to the real variants in the earliest recorded documents. The semantic history of the words was not even attempted, or, if it was, it rarely hit upon the attested evolution of the meaning. Puzzled by this obvious discrepancy, I passed more than five years in analyzing and excerpting all the accessible documents, to the number of 250,000 or more, from the earliest times of the Roman Empire to the year 1300. When I finally arranged my material, and, in the light of the facts thus discovered studied the Germanic laws and everything that had been written on the subject, I was shocked to find that hardly a historical fact, hardly a law, had been ascertained in connection with the morphological and semantic development of intrinsic words. If the historian had to deal with a difficult word, he consulted the etymological dictionaries, and if the etymologist needed a historic fact in order to explain the meaning of a word, he consulted a historian. Thus there was created a vicious circle which produced Germanic, Romance, and Slavic philology. It was clear that the whole science of modem philology needed revision.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.
Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the lat
Présentation de l'éditeur
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
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