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eponym (W3)
Engl. "eponym" geht über frz. "éponyme" zurück auf lat. "eponym" und griech. "eponymos" = dt. "benannt nach", zu griech. "epi" = dt. "von" und griech. "onyma" = dt. "Name".
Als Wurzel wird ide. "apo" = dt. "weg von", "auf" postuliert.
(E?)(L?) https://www.alphadictionary.com/goodword/date/2019/09/09
Meaning: A personal name from which a regular word is derived
Notes: The eponyms of many words have been lost in the din of history. "Bedlam" originated as a Cockney pronunciation of "Bethlehem" for London's "Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem" for the insane. "Tsar" is an ancient Slavic rendition of "Caesar". The proclivity of "Captain William Lynch" of Virginia (1742-1820) to quickly hang those brought before his court gave us the verb, "lynch". Eponyms are not always fair. The very intelligent medieval philosopher "Duns" Scotus's criticism of Aquinas led to his detractors using his name to refer to stupid people, so today we have "dunce". The adjective is "eponymous", though "eponymic" is not unheard-of.
In Play: Many eponyms are obvious. "Plato" gave us "platonic" for one kind of love, "Romeo" gave us his name for another (Phil is quite a "Romeo"). "Franz Mesmer" lent his name to real hypnotism ("mesmerism") and "algorithm" is the English version of "al-Khowarizmi", the name of an Arabic mathematician (780-850), born in Baghdad, who showed that any mathematical problem can be solved by breaking it down into steps. (Browse hundreds more eponyms here.)
Word History: Today's word came a long way to us. We snipped it from French "éponyme". French inherited it from Latin, which had copied it from Greek "eponymos" "named after". The Greek word is made up of "epi" = "from" + "onyma" = "name". The PIE root "apo" = "off of", "away from" turned into "of" and its variant "off" in English. In German it emerged as "auf" = "on" and in Latin as "ab" = "away from". In Russian and other Slavic languages it can be found in "po" = "around", "about", used in adverbial phrases like "po-russky" = "in Russian", "in the Russian way".
(E1)(L1) http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?corpus=0&content=eponym
Abfrage im Google-Corpus mit 15Mio. eingescannter Bücher von 1500 bis heute.
Engl. "eponym" taucht in der Literatur um das Jahr 1830 auf.
Erstellt: 2020-08