Questions tagged [etymology]
The study of the history of words including their origins and the changes they've undergone through time.
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Does understanding Greek as well as Latin help for improving English vocabulary? [migrated]
Is it correct that half percentage of English vocabulary is derived from Latin vocabulary and the other half from Greek? I am reading Marriam Webster Vocabulary Builder, and Word Power Made Easy, and ...
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Possible influence of Phoenician on local dialects in the British Isles during the Iron Age
I'm very interested in the possible influence of Phoenician, specifically, on local dialects in the British Isles during the Iron Age. I'm curious about any historical and linguistic evidence that may ...
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What is the most detailed etymology of a single word ever written?
Is there any example of a single word which has been the object of meticulous study as to its origins, change, spread, diffusion, and bifurcation from an early period of time until the present?
Which ...
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Is PIE weyh₁ (to hunt, persecute) somehow related to PIE weyk (to separate, to select for sacrifice)
I am amateurishly passionate about etymologies (especially of my native Romanian) but more seriously interested in the anthropological theories of René Girard and Walter Burkert, which both ...
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Etymology of Kalb/Canis
Dog is in :
*Indo European languages
Latin/Roman Languages
Latin: canis
Chien in French
Cane in Italian
cão in Portuguese
cane in corsican
câine in Romanian
Armenian
-շուն (shun) in Armenian
*...
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Are there many "lexical universals" like mama/papa - based on similar re-creation?
Reading the article "Where do mama/papa words come from?" by Larry Trask, linked in this answer (itself based on Roman Jakobson's 1959 article ‘Why “mama” and “papa”?’) we see that a ...
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Can it be that the etymology of the Balkan root for "tickle" stretches as far as Korean?
Some context first:
I am interested in the etymology of the Romanian word gâdila/gîdila ("to tickle; the â/î variation is only graphical: it's /ɨ/, the close central unrounded vowel which in ...
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What is the history of using the word "right" to describe something we deserve? [duplicate]
Some languages use a the same word to mean both "a fundamental right" and "the opposite of left". (English, German, French, Russian (as a calque from the German))
I am fascinated, ...
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Etymology of Persian city suffix +jand
City names in Iran and Central Asia, such as "Birjand" in Iran and "Khujand" in Tajikistan end with "jand" suffix.
The first idea that comes to my mind is that it might ...
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Connections between how unrelated words derived from the same root meaning
From re: constructions
The word "martyr" comes originally from the ancient Greek legal term
for "witness", for someone who gives testimony or evidence in a court
of law.
In ...
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Examples of languages that lost auxiliary verbs [duplicate]
I've been looking around and haven't found any examples of languages that at one point in the past had auxiliary verbs but then later lost them. I know that both the Germanic and Romance languages ...
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Where does the word 'Aranyam' (Sanskrit) derive from?
Aranyam basically means a forest / jungle.
Where does the word 'Aranyam' (Sanskrit) derive from?
Background
I searched online but couldn't find any references for the word except a Hungarian word ...
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Origin for specific letters used in Swahili for tenses
The photo above shows the conjugations for past,present,and future & positive vs. negative. To change tense/polarity, you add a specific set of letters(such as, for future positive, "ta")...
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What's the official term for when the verb inverts or flips its Thematic Roles?
Luke Sawczak referred to "the other way around", as switching places.
Interestingly, in English, like and please appear to have switched places at some point in the past.
"This ...
user40211
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Is it not plausible that English "wraith" could be connected to Proto-Germanic "*wraith-" or its derivatives?
For wraith, OED has:
1510s, "ghost," Scottish, of uncertain origin. Weekley and Century Dictionary suggest Old Norse vorðr "guardian" in the sense of "guardian angel." ...
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English toponymy of ‘Wardle’ in Lancashire (near Rochdale) and ‘Wardle’ in Cheshire (near Nantwich)
I found on internet that the name of these two places comes from Old English ‘weard’ (watch) and ‘hyll’ (hill).
‘Wardle’ is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as ‘Warhelle’ and as ‘Wardhul’ in ...
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Origin of the family name affix "tom"
During my mathematics research, I've come across the mathematician Tammo tom Dieck. I have never come across the family name affix "tom", neither Wiktionary nor light googling give me ...
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Etymological relationship between picture/image and education/formation
There are German words Bild (picture/image) and Bildung (education/formation).
In Russian, education is образова́ние [obrazovaniye], whilst obraz in many Slavic languages means either directly picture/...
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Why did the Rebracketing from "Napron" to "Apron" Figuratively Stick?
I read that the cloth that painters and chefs wear, the one now called "apron", used to be called "napron". But then because of rebracketing, "a napron" became "an ...
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Balto-Slavic or archaic IE loanwords in Ossetian?
There are some unique Indo-European words in Ossetian that do not exist in Avestan or Persian, but do exist in Tocharian, Germanic or BS.
Ossetian ӕвзист "silver", has BS cognates("star&...
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Derivation of the Indo-European lemma *bʰréh₂tēr ‘brother’
According to Wiktionary, the word “brother” is traced back to the reconstructed Indo-European lemma *bʰréh₂tēr with the same meaning.
It seems to be structurally similar to other kinship terms, such ...
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Why are telling and counting related in many languages?
In many languages, verbs for telling a story are based on or related to verbs for counting. There are (at least) three groups of such verbs:
English "recount", French "conter" and ...
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How to do Practice Problem for Basque
Link to Problem(both Problems and Answers[but no explanations])
https://sites.google.com/site/paninilinguisticsolympiad/Resources/sample-problems-and-solutions
My question is about the problem titled &...
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Development of Old Norse 2nd and 3rd person sg. (present indicative) forms of "to be"
I was comparing the conjugations of "to be" in Old Norse and Proto-Germanic, and it looks like ON has flipped the 2nd and 3rd person singular forms. Is this what happened, or is there some ...
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Is the Proto-Slavic root *term (dwelling) related to the Proto-Ugric root *tärɜ „open space, room”?
I am curious about the obscure etymology of the Romanian word tărâm (realm, domain, world, geographical space -- usually a poetic word, like in the plural form alte tarâmuri = "other (foreign) ...
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History of perfect tenses
I am thinking about the history of the verb "have". Why is the verb "have" used as an auxiliary verb in the perfect tenses? When did it start to be used that way?
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Relation between Russian "пока" and Czech "zatím"
I have noticed that the Russian word пока means the same as zatím in Czech in both meanings. The first is as a conjunction and the second use means goodbye. I am aware that in Czech the equivalent ...
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What is the origin of the Russians' endonym?
Just to recap. In Old Nordic something along the lines of "Rods" meant "rowers", "men who row" → then it gave name to one Swedish coastal region, "Roslagen" → ...
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Why did the Latin word marmor became French marbre (which is in present day English marble)?
I would like to know what process suffered the Latin word marmor when it was borrowed in French and became marbre. I know that the process from French marbre to English marble is dissimilation, i.e. ...
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Why is feeling and hearing are the same in Italian?
Sentire means hearing, and at the same time feeling, in Italian and it's used passively in both senses.
Mi sento male - I feel bad
Ho sentito il tuo nome - I heard your name
Why among all senses ...
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How did the usage of the word "type" to refer to a person come about?
In Spanish, you often use the word "tipo" not only to say literally the type of something, but to refer to a person (usually with some mildly negative connotations, e.g. "¡este tipo no ...
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Ncuti Gatwa is, according to Wikipedia, pronounced /ˈʃuːti ˈɡætwɑː/ - where is the NC orthography derived from?
On trying to find the pronunciation of the name of Mizero Ncuti Gatwa, a Rwandan-Scottish actor who will be playing the Fourteenth Doctor, I noticed the NC pairing and its pronunciation is listed on ...
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Is there a term for a word taken from another language, but then completely changing the meaning (such as peperoni, latte, chai)
In Italian, il peperone is what the English would call bell pepper, but the English word peperoni has come to mean a type of sausage, in particular when on a pizza.
In Italian, latte is milk, but in ...
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Credible sources for Rho-Rotation?
A teacher of mine recently mentioned a phenomenon in linguistics called "rho-rotation". Across eons and languages if a r/rho sound was next to a vowel it tended to switch postitions and &...
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Are "brat" and "frater" cognates?
Both the Slavic brat (Брат) and the Latin frater mean brother.
Are they cognates? Or is their phonetic "proximity" a red herring?
Related: How were “bratrъ/bratъ” and “sestra” formed in ...
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About phonological history of Middle French
Schwa in hiatus dwindled in French a few centuries ago. Compare the example "saputum > sëu > su" at
Wikipedia/History of French
Does anyone know WHEN this sound change occurred? I ...
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What do "titles" and "Beijing" stand for?
I am looking at metonyms and I have two examples I am interested in, but I am not sure what they stand for.
The bookshop holds over 1 million titles.
Since Beijing, the Olympics have got even more ...
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Could lat. circus 'circle' (< gr. κίρκος) and κύκλος 'cycle' be related?
It is well established that the Latin word circus 'circle' is a loanword from Greek κίρκος kírkos 'circle, ring'. But it seems that κίρκος is of uncertain origin. One possibility is that κίρκος would ...
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When and by whom were the terms 'ergative case' and 'absolutive case' coined?
The terms 'ergative' and 'absolutive' indicate cases in ergative-absolutive languages. The terms themselves derive from Greek respectively Latin roots. Given that Greek and Latin are not themselves ...
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Why does Old Norse ‘Óláfr’ have á instead of ei?
The Proto-Germanic (PG) diphthong *ai generally becomes ei in Old Norse (ON), except regularly before an original *h and commonly before r (but only from PG *r, not from rhotacised PG *z).
Examples ...
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Etymology of words in English translations
I posted this in English but they suggested this site. The question was about the English language because of roughly 50/50 Germanic/Latin roots. Anyhow here it is...
I have often daydreamed about ...
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Why do Proto-germanic "-as" nouns have e-grade?
Why do Proto-germanic "-as" nouns have e-grade (don't have an ablaut like Ancient Greek τρέπ-ω τρόπ-ος, πέκ-ω πόκ-ος, λέχ-ομαι λόχ-ος, φέβ-ομαι φόβ-ος)?
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Why does purple mean red in some places?
The English word purple nowadays refers to the color that is a mixture of blue and red. This word ultimately derives from the Latin purpura which also referred to that color, so it is faithful to that ...
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German contraction "wara" - morphology or phonology?
The regular form
War er ... 'was he ...'
would, in certain positions of sentence in my idiomatic sociolect, sound approximately as
* wara /vaːʁɐ/.
I can not imagine at the moment how this came ...
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ʕattiq, antiquus
When I first heard the Hebrew name for the Old City of Jerusalem, haʕir haʕattiqa, lit. "the old city", I thought I heard an echo in the term. I thought of Attic Greece but more plausibly of ...
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Why is PGmc *hanhaną cogante with *hōkaz, variant of *hakô (“hook”) and not with *hanhuz?
Why is PGmc *hanhaną cogante with *hōkaz, variant of *hakô (“hook”) and not with *hanhuz?
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Do the Turkic languages have "-ia" suffix/ending to denote countries or abstract notions?
Both the Indo-European and Semitic languages have a combination of suffix+ending -i-a, which can be applied to form country names. It also conducts the feminine gender.
The IE and Semitic suffixes are ...
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origin of the word "de" in the name of Tycho de Brahe, Danish astronomer
I am conducting a little research about the origin of the word "de" in a version of a name of the Danish astronomer "Tycho Brahe", namely: "Tycho de Brahe".
Here is what ...
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Etymology of the Turkish word "rüzgâr"
In Turkish rüzgâr means "wind". From the looks of it (especially the long â vowel which is not native to Turkish) it seems to be of Persian origin: "روزگار". Some sources verify ...
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What does Axel Schuessler mean by "area word"?
My son's studying Chinese. His teacher asked how 念 semantically appertains to its components 今心. I don't speak Chinese, and he had no idea. Then we resorted to Wiktionary that refers to Axel ...
user5306