On the semantic relationship between "transience" and "happiness" from Merry's perspective

Last night, a friend in my English root analysis group mentioned the root understanding of the word merry, that is, its two meanings of "fleeting" and "happy" jumped, which seemed difficult to understand. Although we have heard the popular phrase "happiness is short-lived" in many text discussion groups, some friends, like me, can't help but doubt this explanation angle. After twenty minutes' discussion, we finally found that the ideographic explanations of merry in the major etymological dictionaries are biased. In other words, the popular and seemingly reasonable explanations mentioned above are actually deviated from the facts.

As shown in the figure below, we can see that the corresponding indo-European root is mregh-u- by looking up merry in the American traditional dictionary (English version/4th edition). With this clue, we can further look up the Indo-European root dictionary.

Then, in the American Traditional Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (English Version/2nd Edition), you can find the entry content of the Indo-European root mregh-u-, as shown below.

From this, it can be determined that the root of the word merry is short, but the word merry later has a happy meaning, which can be confirmed again in the etymological dictionary shown below.

As can be seen from the underlined part of the above figure, Mr. Ayto, the dictionary editor, used his own guess when explaining the semantic change from short to pleasant. He believes that "having a good time will make people feel that time has been shortened." This explanation is mentioned again in Klein's English Etymological Dictionary (underlined sentence 1), which is translated as: Merry's old English word originally meant "something that shortens time".

Fortunately, he later mentioned that the semantic development of merry is similar to that of German Kurzweil, and the key information of this expression is also clearly mentioned in the English Etymological Dictionary compiled by Shipley, as shown in the following figure.

Since Klein and Shipley, two etymologists, respectively mentioned that the semantic change of the word merry is similar to that of the German compound Kurzweil, we can see the explanation in the following figure if we continue to look down.

In addition, from Klein's and Shipley's explanation of the German word kurzweil, we can know that the literal meaning of kurzweil is short time, and the first part of this German compound word kurz is the homologous counterpart of the English word short (sound change mode: skort->; kort-& gt； Kurt->; Kurz; Scott->; Short), as can be proved from the etymological data of short below.

At this time, we can see that the semantic change of the word "happiness" from transient to pleasant is not as analyzed by Ayto and Klein, let alone the subjective life feeling that "happiness is transient". In other words, the short pastime time is not because you have a good time (forget the time) and feel that time passes quickly, but because the duration of the pastime itself is short, such as ten minutes during recess and intermission. After a long period of nervous tension, you relax, play and joke to relieve the stress.

Therefore, the transition from transience to pleasure should be based on the following logical deduction: transience->; Short (time)-> Recreation-> Interesting/interesting-> Happy. After reading this, you should understand why I came to that conclusion at the beginning of the article.