![]() ![]() Relationships are often less transparent, however. For example, the Latin word candidus, which means "white", is the etymon of English candid. ![]() The term etymon refers to a word or morpheme (e.g., stem or root ) from which a later word or morpheme derives. The word etymology derives from the Greek word ἐτυμολογία ( etumología), itself from ἔτυμον ( étumon), meaning "true sense or sense of a truth", and the suffix -logia, denoting "the study 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, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, semiotics, and phonetics.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 study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes. ![]()
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