I don’t heavily research etymologies but when I look one up in the dictionary it seems that once they get to the Latin root, they call it a day. Well, Latin words had to come from somewhere, right? Why do they not go past Latin? Or is my premise mistaken?
Your premise is mistaken. I often see etymologies going to proto-IndoEuropean.
Etymological dictionaries will typically go past Latin to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, which is as far as anyone knows how to go.
So, what did the etymologist say to the other etymologist?
“When come back, bring PIE.”
Go to the Online Etymology Dictionary and you’ll see that you’re wrong.
Indo-European and Proto Indo-European are reconstructed languages (unless I am very much mistaken). Latin is one of the older written languages that is also a contributor to what is now English. As Exapno Mapcase points out dictionaries do show earlier etymologies going back to IE or PIE, but given the somewhat provisional nature of our knowledge IE and PIE it can make sense to stop at the Latin–particularly for a dictionary whose main purpose isn’t etymology.l
What are you looking the etymology up in, CookingWithGas? There are some sources that deliberately stop at Latin or Greek. There’s a set of workbooks (which I’ve glanced at), designed for elementary school children, that’s supposed to teach them about the Latin and Greek roots of our words. The idea is that this will allow children to guess at the meaning of words that they haven’t seen before. Going all the way back to Proto-Indo-European would be too confusing for them.
In any case, even looking at Proto-Indo-European isn’t going all the way back. That language had ancestors too. The general supposition is that the earliest human languages were 50,000 to 200,000 years ago, while Proto-Indo-European goes back less than 10,000 years. So we can’t go back more than about 5% to 20% of the entire history of human languages.
The OP’s premise is not mistaken. Most dictionaries don’t go back further than Latin, Greek, or Germanic, except perhaps for a few words. The dictionaries cited above as going back further are virtually all specialized etymological dictionaries. They are not your typical Collegiate-sized or even unabridged dictionaries you’ll find in your average house or office.
The reason most dictionaries don’t go back further is space. There’s a premium on space in a dictionary. Putting in longer etymologies means they’d have to remove some words. It’s a trade-off and one that I feel lexicographers have done correctly. The reconstructed PIE roots are mainly of interest to a very small fraction of dictionary users. Your average user is served better by having more words than more extensive etymologies.
Not only space, but also sources: many dictionaries will not list etymologies that can’t be shown from written sources. A Spanish dictionary will list almost no words with a Basque or Celtic origin, not because there are no words from Basque or Celtic sources in Spanish, but because there’s no written proof of the source. There are a few words which I’d wager are from Basque if I had a way to prove it (among other things, they’re common in areas around the Basque-speaking parts of Spain and in Latin American areas with ancestry from those same regions; uncommon elsewhere), but which DRAE lists as either “Spanish Latin” or “Spanish Arabic”, sometimes with a mention of those regions (“Spanish Arabic from La Rioja”). What this means is that the oldest written source they have is dialectal Arabic or Latin and a previous source cannot be proven.
The American Heritage dictionary (in its various editions over the decades) has been, for many years, one of the top-selling dictionaries of English (in the US), and it’s famous for having added PIE roots since early on (1970s) – not just in the etymology section of the entry for each appropriate word, but with a full PIE mini-dictionary at the back, including lists of descendant words in English (“shit” is a cousin of “scissors”! Cool!). The latest edition does all this for Semitic roots as well.
I was very lucky that my parents chose to give me this particular dictionary when I was about 11 years old – the PIE stuff shaped my whole understanding of languages and language change.
I wonder if that’s why when someone rips a really loud fart, we say he cut one.
Many years ago I answered almost the same question in a Staff Report and made almost the same joke as Mr. Bigfoot.
Some dictionaries don’t list roots in proto-languages because we don’t have direct evidence of what any of those languages actually were.
So yes, in theory, for most Latin words there would be a variety of proto-roots, but the ability to state definitively what those were is lacking. For a basic reference work (as opposed to specialized etymological works) there is a need to stop at the firm factual limits of our knowledge.
By the way, to take a Latin root back to PIE is going very far – there would be many other proto-roots on the way (proto-Italic, etc.).
Once you get past Greek, you’re even more likely not to be dealing with quite the same meanings anymore, and it’s more arcane linguistic stuff.
Not that we even have extant written stuff past Greek (or Latin, or a late-Antique Germanic dialect) for the roots of most modern English words. (We have some Hittite, which is really, really old, but not quite in direct ancestral line, and some other stuff is even less related to our modern Western IE dialects.)
And we have very little reconstructed for Nostratic,* if one even buys the Nostratic hypothesis.* If you want to see probable Nostratic roots, get a Nostratic dictionary. It doesn’t rate high enough to get in general reference works.
PIE, Proto-Indo-European, is really freaking*** proto.*** It’s a reconstruction of the deepest roots we can guess at for the IE languages (kind of; there is Nostratic, but again, not a lot of it and not real certain). It is not a snapshot of dialect at any single point in history. We can’t say for certain any civilization ever spoke PIE quite as we know it, though we think someone (maybe early proto-Aryans, maybe somebody else) came pretty close. You can’t get much earlier, by design.
There’s a point that slightly off the track but one that I’ve been meaning to make in one of these threads. I’m surprised that some basic facts about the history of languages and about the Indo-European family aren’t taught in high school. It’s really bothersome that someone can graduate from high school, someone who plans to go to college and who is fairly intelligent, while knowing nothing about Indo-European. I think an ideal place to teach such facts would be in senior English courses. No deep technicalities would be taught, just some names of the other Indo-European languages and the names of some of the other language families, along with how we know about such things.
As I said in another post, there are books for elementary school children with lists of Greek and Latin roots in order to teach them about how to guess at the meaning of words that they haven’t seen before. Not teaching high school students about Indo-European strikes me as being way behind the times. We’ve known about Indo-European since 1785. Why isn’t it taught in high schools?
We don’t teach any linguistics in HS*. HS English is focused on literature and writing skills. I think a more appropriate place to teach this would be World History, which I think is generally taught in Freshman or Sophomore years.
*Unless there are a few public schools out there that actually have linguistic classes.
I think that some linguistics should be taught in English classes. It’s not necessary to teach a lot, just some basics. English would be a better place to teach it than history, I think.
Ok. Hereis the curriculum for high school English in Texas. Go through and decide which things are not important and don’t need to be taught in order to have time for linguistics instead.
Sure. You can take out any combination of these aspects of English IV. 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 24, 25, 26.
Or you can recognize that a school year is 180 days. Taking up a day is not even one percent of the time. And I remember that we never made it through to the end of American History ever. Even in this world of teach to the test, flexibility exists.
Curricula are designed to be as high-sounding as possible. That doesn’t mean that they are cut in stone or that every teacher manages excellence in every one of those 26 items. It also means that some of those items are far more important than others, and some of them are dragged out into multiple sections. It’s a game. Period. And you can change the game.