ABSTRACT
For the Enlightenment, the nature of language was a crucial philosophical question. And language theory played a central role in the conception of the sciences and arts and their interrelationship. But, for the philosophers of the Enlightenment, etymology no longer functioned as a key to the world itself. On the contrary, the philosophers of the Enlightenment dismissed traditional etymologies as nothing more than 'cabalistical fictions'. During the Enlightenment, words were increasingly studied in relation to other words rather than in relation to objects. This shift is marked in the clearest terms in the article on etymology written by the young economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot for the Encyclopédie. To emphasize the point, Turgot offers a parable of word origins in the form of the etymology of the word falbala. It is worth pausing over this etymology because in so many ways it violates expectations about the kind of narrative that should appear in a properly historical etymology.
