Some years ago in the Houston Museum of Modern Art --and I'm recounting this from memory alone-- there was an exhibition of the works of a professional artist that consisted entirely in her posting on the walls of the museum enlarged transcripts of her attempts to write out 'Shakespeare from Memory', that is, to tell the stories of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello et al. without consulting the texts or any texts about them. I think she also tried the Bible. Now as art this was entirely uninteresting, except perhaps as an exercise in the forgotten ars memoriae. As an art in the sense of techne it is something we all do all the time, and something worth doing. I myself often do it with word origins, about which I generally know quite a bit, but about which I'm generally a little off when I don't consult the proper written sources.
G. W. Leibniz thought that when every last word in the Scripture has been analyzed to death, and after we'd moved on and exhausted the holy writs of neighboring cultures, and perfected the philological study of pagan learning, all of which he seemed to have thought would take another century or so, there would be no other source of ancient wisdom left but the study of etymology, and particularly of its toponymic and hydronymic sub-branches.
He believed many words are onomatopoieic in origin. Take the German adjective quek, which means 'alive', and which has a few surviving English cognates, e.g., 'quicksilver' (i.e., mercury, argent vif in French, so named because it appears to have an internal principle of activity rather than to be purely inert like most other elements), and fixed expressions such as 'the quick and the dead' (which means not 'the fast and the dead', but 'the living and the dead'). Leibniz believed that this word had the same source as the verb queken, which is nothing but the sound frogs are thought to make in German, and that for the primitive Germanic tribes the croak of a frog came to serve as an emblem of life itself. Croaking was a pure expression of living, from which we may already infer that queken did not have the secondary meaning that 'to croak' has in English.
Leibniz was wrong, and in fact quek comes from a common Indo-European root. I don't recall what the Sanskrit is, but the Greek is the well-known bios. If bios and quek look nothing alike to you, it might help to insert vita between them, which seems to share a bit in both.
Today's scholars of ethnotaxonomy often do for Indonesians what Leibniz sought to do for the ancient Germans. I recently read something by Anthony Forth on the onomatopoieic origins of words for 'bird' in Eastern Indonesia. I'd give you a reference, but as I've said I'm doing this from memory. A full reference I can give without further checking is to Sigrid von Schulenberg's work Leibniz als Sprachforscher (Frankfurt a. M., 1973), which I take to be a comprehensive study of the birth of ethnolinguistics.
Quick is still used to mean 'living' in English.
See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/quicken
Posted by: Alive and Qicking | October 1, 2009 at 04:25 PM