Etymology: The Poster

Along with my colleagues, I developed a poster for the 2012 Vice Chancellor's Symposium held on 30 October at Wellington, New Zealand.  Each poster illustrated a response to the question: "How are we defining ourselves as 21st century scholars?"  The teaching consultants approached the question as a team with multiple posters answering the question in different ways, and branding for uniformity.  My poster (see below) offered an etymological treatment.  This blog post allows me to expand on that poster, and use the research that would not fit on it.

This work by Katarina Gray-Sharp is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

There are a large number of words associated with academic scholarship.  The poster covered four: "scholar", "learn", "research", and "academic".  In three of the cases,  the poster showed the progression up from the Proto Indo-European root towards the modern English term.  In the fourth case, 'academic', a description in narrative form was offered.

The placement of 'scholar' and 'learn' next to each other was purposeful.  'Scholar', and the related 'scol' (school), is from *segh- which means "to hold in one's power; to have". Comparatively, 'learn', and 'lār-hūs' (lore-house) are from *leis- meaning "to furrow; learn". 'School' replaced 'lore house' over time, moving the linguistic emphasis of education from learning to having.

Outside of the poster, I considered related terms.  'Train', for example, is a derivation of the *tragh- meaning "to drag, train, pull, move". Other derivations include 'abstract', 'distract', and 'portray'. Comparatively, 'teach' is a derivation of the PIE deik- meaning "to teach, show". Other derivations include 'dictate', 'judge', and 'predict'. The two words are connected in matters of the body: tragh- is related to 'foot' as deik- is related to 'toe'. Further, the approaches suggested by the two PIE sources require different but related skillsets.

I continue to be attracted to etymological understandings of the world, and welcome commentary from any who may use this method in their teaching.