Legacy
Christoffel Plantijn had been a friend of Goropius's and the Antwerp-based printing house known as the Plantin Press, which first published Goropius's works in 1569, printed the linguist-physician’s posthumous collected work in 1580 as a massive volume of more than a thousand pages. Goropius's work was met with a mixture of ridicule and admiration. Goropius is considered to have given Dutch linguistics, and Gothic philology in general, a bad name. Though Goropius had admirers (among them Abraham Ortelius and Richard Hakluyt), his etymologies have been considered "linguistic chauvinism," and Leibniz coined the term "goropism" to mean "absurd etymology." Justus Lipsius and Hugo Grotius discounted Goropius's linguistic theories. "Never have I read greater nonsense," the scholar Joseph Scaliger wrote of Goropius's etymologies.
However, Goropius's work precedes that of William Jones, the “discoverer” of the Indo-European language family, and though replete with eccentric and ridiculous etymologies, nevertheless can be considered a foundation for the field of historical linguistics.
Read more about this topic: Johannes Goropius Becanus
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“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
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