Re: Pagan - etymology?

Barry Garcia wrote:

> CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
> >You are right and the other person is wrong, but no amount of authority
> >is going to help you any.  Some people just have tendentious attachments
> >to false etymologies, like the notion that "surname" = "sir-name"
> >(which I encountered on another mailing list; of course it's really
> >"super-name" meaning "additional name").  The only thing to do is to
> >call it correctly once (which you have done), drop the discussion on the
> >other mailing list, and move on.
>
> Of course, i wasnt going to push it on him ;). And i know how that goes.
> I've had these types of discussions on my school's message board and i've
> ended up just banging my head against the wall. I asked him to provide me
> with references, and i've left it at that.
Well, I think we're confusing issues a little.  According Cary and Schullard's
_A History of Rome_, "[e]ach valley or plateau constituted a pagus with an
elective headman (mendix).... [t]he pagi were loosely associated into cantonal
associations... and each of these populi formed a touto....".  Now, that is the
status of the pagus as of, oh, 200 BC;  the question is:  whence comes the
English word _pagan_?  _Paganus_, which is the direct ancestor of English 'pagan',
comes from a time much later than 200 BC; more like 350-400 AD.  This is a
problem, because, as I pointed out earlier, there had been a definite semantic
shift from the time of the Republic to the late Empire.  So, what this boils down
to is that your friend's definition was *substantially* correct *for the Late Latin
meaning of the word*, inasmuch as country folk are "people of the earth".  He
erred in trying to give it the romantic connotations that we associate with that
phrase.  It did not have any, since, as I have already said, it was a derogatory
form by that time.   (Your dictionary is thus misleading, since the intermediary
derivational form underwent a crucial semantic shift in meaning.)

If you don't believe me, I could give you the name and email address of my
Roman history professor who gave me that information in lecture.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: trwier
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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