By Anatoly Liberman
Before we embark on the etymology of golf, something should be said about the pronunciation of the word. Golf does not rhyme with wolf (because long ago w changed the vowel following it), but in the speech of some people it rhymes with oaf, and “goafers” despises everyone who would allow l to creep in between o and f. Here is part of a letter to the editor dated November 1893: “Among the old players of the game it is called goff. ‘Caddies’ at St. Andrew’s and such places call it gowff. I have heard respectable individuals call it goaf (like loaf). Golf (the l being sounded) is unknown in Scotland. What boots it that one old gentleman of Blackheath renown should say golf (sounding the l)? He is simply wrong.” Nothing is more important than knowing the ultimate truth. (St. Andrew’s is the Royal & Ancient Golf Club St. Andrew’s, founded in 1754. It occupies a most imposing building. If my never-to-be-fulfilled dream to organize a center for English etymology came true, I would be overjoyed to have a fiftieth part of such an edifice at my disposal. Blackheath, 1608, is the seat of the oldest golf club in England.) As far as etymology is concerned, the rift between the two schools boots not at all. Scots golf, though unrecorded, must have preceded gowf or goff. In English, including its northernmost varieties, l was lost between a vowel and a consonant, as in folk, walk, talk, chalk, half, calf, rather early (oaf itself is derived from Olaf, a doublet of alf “elf”) but inconsistently. Dutch has gone much further along this path. Since in Scotland people played golf before it became a favorite sport in England, we may assume that golf is the bookish (spelling) pronunciation, while goff ~ gouf(f) reflects the popular norm.
Some old ideas on the origin of golf should be disregarded. According to one of them, the etymon of golf is Swedish golv “floor.” But why should a lawn game that has never been played on the floor, and in medieval Sweden not played at all, be called “floor”? And the Swedish for “golf” is golf, not golv! There are only two viable possibilities: the word is either Dutch or Scots. The Dutch hypothesis has a strong foundation, whereas in Scots we have only gouf(f) “to strike,” an onomatopoeia, a “sound gesture” accompanying a blow, unless (which is more likely) it was coined on analogy with the noun golf. Middle Dutch kolv meant “club, bat.” Calling a game by its main implement is possible. Evidently, this happened in the history of cricket (compare Flemish cricke(e) “stick”). The lack of consensus about the origin of golf stems from Oxford’s negative (or, let us say, extremely cautious) attitude toward the word’s Dutch descent. This is what the OED says: “[N]one of the Dutch games have been convincingly identified with golf, nor is it certain that kolv was ever used to denote the game as well as the implement, though the game was and is called kolven (the infinitive of the derived v[er]b). Additional difficulty is caused by the absence of any Scottish forms with initial c or k and by the fact that golf is mentioned much earlier than any of the Dutch sports.” Few people are prepared to contest the OED. Yet in light of the latest research there is no need to doubt the Dutch or Flemish origin of golf. The chronological diffic