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 ( etumología), itself from ἔτυμον ( étumon), 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, semiotics, 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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