Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Whilst looking around for uses of bonfire for bonafide, I came across this piece of chat room bravado:
I am also a bonfire member of book haram and will exterminate any i***t that abuse me again.
Nigerian chat
Aha! I knew that Boko Haram meant something like “Western education is forbidden.” Is boko a pidgin version of book? Investigation showed that I am certainly not the first to suspect that. Other than Wikipedia, here’s an example from the straight Dope forum:
Boko in Nigerian Hausa refers to the latin characters and the latin writing system for the Hausa language. It comes from the English for book.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/arc … 22966.html
Now most people defer to the authority of Paul Newman, who in 2013 published an article showing that the etymology of Hausa boko has no connection to book:
There are various pieces of evidence that support the view that boko not only never meant book, but could not have come from book. No one factor is crucial in and of itself, but they add up to the same conclusion, namely that the resemblance between boko and book is purely coincidental and of no historical linguistic import.
Nevertheless, other than the first citation above, there seem to be plenty of Nigerians who support the folk-etymological book origin. Here’s a lecturer in the History department of a Nigerian university:
It seems that the group might not have explicitly given the name “Boko Haram†to itself; rather the name could come from the external view of its basic beliefs: “Boko Haram†is derived from a combination of the Hausa word boko meaning “book†and the Arabic word haram which is something forbidden, ungodly or sinful. Literally, it means “book is sinfulâ€, but its deeper meaning is that Western education is sinful, sacrilegious or ungodly and should therefore be forbidden.
http://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga … e/view/330
I vote eggcorn. The initial characterization of Western schools as boko , or “false”, might have been based on a kind of play on words, though now even some Nigerians accept that it is book haram.
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Interesting. But if “boko” really does mean book, then “book haram” is not an eggcorn, is it? And if it doesn’t mean book, then it’s more of a folk etymology.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Boko does not mean book. I neglected to say just what boko does mean. It’s a Hausa adjective that conforms very closely in meaning to our bogus, indicating fake, sham, false, deceptive. It used to be affixed to “school”, as in bogus school, but then the school part got dropped and boko was kept as a kind of shorthand synecdoche.
Thinking boko derives from book is folk etymology, yes, or false etymology at least. It is also what we have been calling a hidden eggcorn. It comes out into the open when Nigerians refer to book haram, which they do quite frequently, according to google search.
Folk etymologies and eggcorns, as far as I understand the definitions, share a large middle ground between the fully established use in the language of the classic FEs and the idiosyncrasy of eggcorns.
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It sounds, then, like “book haram” is the kind of folk etymology that shades into an eggcorn—not really established, as a folk etymology would be.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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