Concept
Etymology
Overview
Etymology ( ET-ih-MOL-ə-jee) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century, as a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become an increasingly rigorous scientific field of study. It is most directly tied to historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, and additionally draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to construct a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings that a word (and its related parts) has carried 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.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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rejects the translation _veriloquium_ of ετυμολογια and adopts _notatio_, the _rerum nota_ (Greek συμβολον) being the name so explained (_Top._ 35). Varro translated ετυμολογια by _originatio_ (Quintil. I. 6, 28). Aristotle had already laid down rules for this rhetorical use of etymology, and Plato also incidentally adopts it, so it may speciously be said to belong to the old Academico-Peripatetic school.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Academica
Names Etymology several times; states what Etymology is.
But, of course, etymology is no safe guide either as to the actual or the correct use of terms; and it seems to me that the term "sense-data" is often, and quite properly, used merely for _the sort of_ entities that are given in sense, and not in any way limited to those which are actually given. But though I think I might thus have used "sense-data" quite correctly instead of "sensibles," I think the latter term is…
G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies
States what Etymology is; names Etymology twice.
Well, that old etymology--what a lesson it is against certain gloomy, austere, ascetic people, that have gone about as if this world were all a dismal-prison house! It has, indeed, got all the ugly things in it that I have been alluding to; but there is an eternal sky over it, and the blessed sunshine, verdure of spring, and rich autumn, and all that in it, too.
Thomas Carlyle, On the Choice of Books
Opens on Etymology; names Etymology.
Philosophers who discussed Etymology
Related ideas
- Socratic dialogue
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Washington, D.C.
- Outline of ancient India
- Grammar
- Hungarian language
- Etymologiae
- India
- Vedas
- Isidore of Seville
- Hagiography
- Byzantine Empire
- Morpheme
- Metaphor
- Cratylus (dialogue)
- Linguistics
- Plato
- Phoneme
- Philology
- Patanjali
- Plutarch
- Socrates
- Root (linguistics)
- Sanskrit
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Anarchism.