Etymology

For other uses, see Etymology (disambiguation).

"Etymologies" redirects here. For the work by Isidore of Seville, see Etymologiae.

Not to be confused with Entomology or Etiology.

Etymology (/ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ ET-im-OL-ə-jee^[1]) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time.^[2] In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study.^[1] Most directly tied to historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, it additionally draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to attempt a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings and changes that a word (and its related parts) carries throughout its history. The origin of any particular word is also known as its etymology.

For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts, particularly texts about the language itself, 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. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about forms that are too old for any direct information to be available. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots in many European languages, for example, can be traced back to the origin of the Indo-European language family.

Even 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.

Etymology

The word etymology is derived from the Ancient Greek word ἐτυμολογία (etumologíā), itself from ἔτυμον (étumon), meaning 'true sense or sense of a truth', and the suffix -logia, denoting 'the study or logic of'.^[3][4]

The etymon refers to the predicate (i.e. stem^[5] or root^[6]) from which a later word or morpheme derives. For example, the Latin word candidus, which means 'white', is the etymon of English candid. Relationships are often less transparent, however. English place names such as Winchester, Gloucester, Tadcaster share different forms of a suffix that originated as the Latin castrum 'fort'.

Reflex is the name given to a descendant word in a daughter language, descended from an earlier language. For example, Modern English heat is the reflex of the Old English hǣtu. Rarely, this word is used in reverse, and the reflex is actually the root word rather than the descendant word. However, this usage is usually filled by the term etymon instead. A reflex will sometimes be described simply as a descendant, derivative or derived from an etymon (but see below).^{[citation needed]}

Cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language.^[7] Doublets or etymological twins or twinlings (or possibly triplets, and so forth) are specifically cognates within the same language. Although they have the same etymological root, they tend to have different phonological forms, and to have entered the language through different routes.

A root is the source of related words within a single language (no language barrier is crossed). Similar to the distinction between etymon and root, a nuanced distinction can sometimes be made between a descendant and a derivative.

A derivative is one of the words which have their source in a root word, and were at some time created from the root word using morphological constructs such as suffixes, prefixes, and slight changes to the vowels or to the consonants of the root word. For example: unhappy, happily, and unhappily are all derivatives of the root word happy. The terms root and derivative are used in the analysis of morphological derivation within a language in studies that are not concerned with historical linguistics and that do not cross the language barrier.

Methods

Graphical representation of the relationships between etymologically-related words. 'Etymon' is used in linguistic jargon, while 'root' is the more common colloquial term.

Etymologists apply a number of methods to study the origins of words, some of which are:

• Philological research. Changes in the form and meaning of the word can be traced with the aid of older texts, if such are available.
• Making use of dialectological data. The form or meaning of the word might show variations between dialects, which may yield clues about its earlier history.
• The comparative method. 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 study of semantic change. Etymologists must often make hypotheses about changes in the meaning of particular words. Such hypotheses are tested against the general knowledge of semantic shifts. 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.

Types of word origins

Etymological 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).

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. 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). It is even less obvious that bless is related to blood (the former was originally a derivative term meaning 'to mark with blood').

Semantic change may also occur. For example, the English word bead originally meant 'prayer', and acquired its modern meaning through the practice of counting the recitation of prayers by using small objects strung together (beads). One type of semantic change involves the quotidianisation of metaphor.^[8] Thus the word "trauma", the predecessors of which apparently referenced an "open hole" in the body, has passed through some metaphorical stage or stages and now often refers to some sort of psychological wound.^[9]