Ramón Menéndez Pidal as Etymologist
Summary
Like most Romance scholars of his generation, Ramón Menéndez Pidal was an accomplished etymologist. In most instances, his etymological verdicts enter into broader historico-grammatical, dialectological, and narrowly philological investigations, from which they can be laboriously distilled. Nevertheless, one also discovers exercises, of varying length, in ‘pure etymology’. The most important, among these, are (a) a string of etymological notes w>hich appeared as a single article in a French journal, in 1900; (b) the book-length glossary included in his monumental edition of the Cantar de Mio Cid (1908–11); (c) the extended review article (1920) devoted to the original edition of W. Meyer-Lübke’s Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch; and (d) a major section of the Orígenes del español – the book that marks the author’s summit in matters of linguistic analysis and betrays a thoroughly personal style. The material subjected to assessment shows the major progress achieved by the author in a quarter-century of continued growth.