The Valid and Non-valid Application of Etymology/Philology to History, by George Hewitt

SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics, 2 (1991-92, 5-24)/Revue des Etudes Géorgiennes et Caucasiennes 6-7, (REGC), 1993, 247-264.

Although the search for a word’s earliest recoverable meaning and the ascription of the etymon to the appropriate source-language can often be an exceptionally demanding task, it is surprising how many people think that they are equipped to try their hand at etymologising by virtue simply of knowing the relevant language(s). The frequently resulting folk-etymologies can be amusing, if simplistic. For example, take the Georgian toponym Vardzia, which is the site of a famous complex of caves near the Georgian-Turkish border. Myth has it that the famous Queen Tamar (1184-1213) was once out hunting with an uncle when she got lost in these caves. Searching for her, the uncle heard her cry:

The shortened form var+dzia was then assumed to have given rise to the toponym!

The mention of toponyms raises an obvious and direct link between etymology and history. Despite the movement and resettlement of peoples, place-names (of settlements, towns, rivers, etc…) are especially resistant to change (Bynon 1977.273-278), so that, to take the famous example, although Celtic-speakers are now confined to fringes of the British Isles (including Ireland), the etymology of toponyms reveals that their ancestors must once have been spread not only over the whole of these islands but also over much of the mainland of Europe, being the Keltoi, northern neighbours to the Ancient Greeks, and the Galli-residents of Julius Caesar’s Gaul. And so a purely philological exercise, entirely unbiased in intent, produces a hypothesis which can be tested against the evidence of either documented history or archaeology.

When it comes to ethnonyms, a priori one would perhaps suppose that a people's self-designation would always be derived from the lexical stock of that people's language and thus etymologisable, if at all, only in terms of that language. This, however, is not always so. The Turkic origin of the ethnonym Bulgar(ian) is a case in point. In the Caucasus the self-designation of the Georgians is kartvel-i (plural kartvel-eb-i), which the grand old man of Georgian philology, Ak’ak’i Shanidze (1887-1987), dared to suggest was an adaptation of the proper designation of the Iranian Parthians (kart-v-el-i ⇐ part-v-el-i ⇐ part-av-el-i), which in its adapted form came to replace whatever earlier ethnonym had existed (1978). Such toponyms as the English Georgia with its ethnonym Georgian (Russian Gruzija/Gruziny, Turkish Gürcistan/Gürcüler) are believed to be derived from the Persian adaptation of the Armenian complex vr-, as in the phrase i Vr-ac ‘amongst the Georgians’. Despite the veneration in which he was generally held, Shanidze was not exactly praised for propounding his theory, for it seemed to a proud people that to suggest a foreign provenance for their self-designation was somehow to cast aspersions on their national identity. In this case, then, an unassuming piece of philology met with an unfavourable reaction for wholly non-philological reasons.

The problem I really wish to address, however, is the unacceptability of a linguist deliberately setting out with the intention of manufacturing an etymology in order to create, or at least support, a past which a (group of) people might find politically convenient at some point in their nation's history. The north-western area of Georgia is the homeland of the North West Caucasian people we call Abkhazians. As part of the long-standing conflict between the Abkhazians and their Kartvelian (viz. Georgian, Mingrelian, Svan and Laz) neighbours, various attempts have been made by both historians and linguists on the Kartvelian side to prove either that today's (North West Caucasian) Abkhazians replaced about 3-5 centuries ago some earlier (Kartvelian) Abkhazians and thus have no historical rights over this territory, or that Abkhazia has two aboriginal peoples, namely the North West Caucasian Abkhazians and the Kartvelians. The former theory is particularly associated with the late Pavle Ingoroqva and has recently been re-proposed by the Svan linguist Aleksandre Oniani (for a critique see Hewitt Forthcoming).

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