Etymology as Collective Therapy

Jost Trier’s ¹ reputation outside Germany is based on his role in the development of European structural semantics. Trier features in survey works on the history of linguistics and in textbooks on semantics in the guise of the founder of word-field theory and, with Weisgerber, as the chief inter-war exponent of structural linguistics in Germany. His study of the structure of the Middle High German vocabulary Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes (1931a) has become a minor classic in modern European linguistic thought. However, with the exception of two largely retrospective articles published in 1968 and 1972, Trier’s ‘structuralist’ writings appeared between 1931 and 1938 (the latter the publication of a paper delivered in 1936), and the bulk of his publications pursued an interest in etymological semantics which show remarkable continuity in themes and methodology from the mid-1930s to the end of his career. In simple terms, Trier moved from word-field theory with its notion of the vocabulary as a synchronic structure, to the panchronic study of word-relations in German. It would however be oversimple to conclude that Trier found structuralism to be incompatible with Nazism; Trier was never committed to an ahistorical or abstract semantic formalism. More accurately, one might say that the tension between a synchronic, structural semantics and a sense of the importance of historical continuity and panchronic relationships was ultimately resolved in favour of the latter.