Conlangery Shorts 34: Musings on Etymology
George uses some research into the etymology of coronavirus to launch into a way to build a story around the etymology of a word. Links and Resources: Coronavirus on Wikipedia Almeida JD, Berry DM, Cunningham CH, Hamre D, Hofstad MS, Mallucci L, McIntosh K, Tyrrell DA (November 1968). “Virology: Coronaviruses” . Nature . 220 (5168): 650. Bibcode : 1968Natur.220..650. . doi : 10.1038/220650b0 Tyrrell DA, Fielder M (2002). Cold Wars: The Fight Against the Common Cold . Oxford University Press. p. 96. ISBN 978-0-19-263285-2 . Original Script Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages, and the people who create them, I’m George Corley. I’m doing a short today where I’ll discuss etymology, where words come from. Before we get to that, Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons on Patreon. I know that there’s a lot of uncertainty right now, but if you like Conlangery, and you’re able to throw a buck at us, patreon.com/conlangery is where you can do that. In the last episode of Conlangery, I repeated a commonly stated etymology of coronavirus, stating that it was named for its “crown-like spikes”. Recently, while working on some English teaching videos with my wife, I found out that that etymology may be a folk etymology, or at least an incomplete story. Now, I usually don’t make a whole short trying to debunk something I said on the show, but as I worked out the issue, I thought I could use it to talk a little bit about how to do etymology in a conlang. I got here when I was checking the Wikipedia article for coronavirus just to get some public-domain images for the video. I noticed their etymology didn’t match the one that I had heard on the news and repeated on the show. It instead said that coronaviruses resemble a “solar corona”. The same etymology is listed on Wiktionary. It was interesting to me that this etymology seems to be knowable enough to be on the dang Wikipedia page, but somehow news organizations are saying something else For this solar corona etymology, Wikipedia cites a 1968 note in Nature about coronaviruses citing the original team that coined the term: [T]here is also a characteristic “fringe” of projections 200 Å [ ångström s] long, which are rounded or petal shaped … This appearance, recalling the solar corona, is shared by mouse hepatitis virus and several viruses recently recovered from man… I also found among the sources a 2002 book co-written by David Tyrrell, one of the authors cited in the Nature source. That described the naming of the virus this way: We looked more closely at the appearance of the new viruses and noticed that they had a kind of halo surrounding them. Recourse to a dictionary produced the Latin equivalent, corona, and so the name coronavirus was born. Those sources seem pretty authoritative, since they both trace to members of the team that coined the term. I’m not uncovering anything new, here, either. This origin was known, it’s just that a lot of news sources seem to have repeated a different story. The projections that are discussed here are the spike proteins, which on an electron micrograph do form a ring-like structure around the virus. I’m not sure which story is better or if perhaps a combination of different metaphors all collided in corona , but it does seem like “crown-like spikes” was at best a game of telephone with one of the possible inspirations. Now, this is a show about conlanging, and I’ve often said it’s not as important whether something is true as that it’s useful for your art. In this case, getting closer to the true story tells us something about how we should incorporate the story of a word into its etymology. The key thing to notice here is exactly what the scientists who named the virus were looking at and what they knew about it. On the news, we often see color 3D renderings of a coronavirus. Those are illustrations made to show the virus structure and colorized to highlight important parts of the virus. When t