![]() Plutarch employed etymologies insecurely based on fancied resemblances in sounds. From Antiquity through the 17th century, from Pāṇini to Pindar to Sir Thomas Browne, etymology had been a form of witty wordplay, in which the supposed origins of words were creatively imagined to satisfy contemporary requirements for example, the Greek poet Pindar (born in approximately 522 BCE) employed inventive etymologies to flatter his patrons. The search for meaningful origins for familiar or strange words is far older than the modern understanding of linguistic evolution and the relationships of languages, which began no earlier than the 18th century. It acquired its modern meaning through the practice of counting the recitation of prayers by using beads. For example, the English word bead originally meant "prayer". It is even less obvious that bless is related to blood (the former was originally a derivative with the meaning "to mark with blood"). Due to sound change, it is not readily obvious that the English word set is related to the word sit (the former is originally a causative formation of the latter). While the origin of newly emerged words is often more or less transparent, it tends to become obscured through time due to sound change or semantic change. For example, the assumption of a particular change of meaning may be substantiated by showing that the same type of change has occurred in other languages as well.Įtymological theory recognizes that words originate through a limited number of basic mechanisms, the most important of which are language change, borrowing (i.e., the adoption of " loanwords" from other languages) word formation such as derivation and compounding and onomatopoeia and sound symbolism (i.e., the creation of imitative words such as "click" or "grunt"). Such hypotheses are tested against the general knowledge of semantic shifts. Etymologists must often make hypotheses about changes in the meaning of particular words. By a systematic comparison of related languages, etymologists may often be able to detect which words derive from their common ancestor language and which were instead later borrowed from another language. ![]() The form or meaning of the word might show variations between dialects, which may yield clues about its earlier history. Changes in the form and meaning of the word can be traced with the aid of older texts, if such are available. English place names such as Winchester, Gloucester, Tadcaster share in different modern forms a suffixed etymon that was once meaningful, Latin castrum ' fort '.ĭiagram showing relationships between etymologically related words Methods Įtymologists apply a number of methods to study the origins of words, some of which are: Relationships are often less transparent, however. For example, the Latin word candidus, which means ' white ', is the etymon of English candid. stem or root ) from which a later word or morpheme derives. The term etymon refers to the predicate (ie. The word etymology derives from the Ancient Greek word ἐτυμολογία ( ἐτυμολογία), itself from ἔτυμον ( ἔτυμον), meaning ' true sense or sense of a truth ', and the suffix -logia, denoting ' the study or logic of '. In this way, word roots in many European languages, for example, can be traced all the way back to the origin of the Indo-European language family.Įven though etymological research originated from the philological tradition, much current etymological research is done on language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian. ![]() By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about forms that are too old for any direct information to be available. It is a subfield of historical linguistics, philology and semiotics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to construct a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings that a morpheme, phoneme, word, or sign has carried across time.įor languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts, and texts about the language, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in meaning and form, or when and how they entered the language. Etymology ( / ˌ ɛ t ɪ ˈ m ɒ l ə dʒ i/ ET-im- OL-ə-jee ) is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes.
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