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The study of the history of words including their origins and the changes they've undergone through time.

10 votes
Accepted

Why should etymology stop where it does?

You are essentially asking two questions: Why aren't there etymologies for an English word going back to Ancient Egyptian? This question is easily answered: Because such words are rare beasts and …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
1 vote

Practical ways to verify etymology

Probably the closest match to your requirements is the following resource Proto-Indo-European Lexicon hosted by FIN-CLARIN. It provides a detailed chain of sound shifts for known cognates. It does no …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
10 votes

What is the Proto-Indo-European root word for electricity?

Its etymology is not really well-established. …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
8 votes

Etymology of a word "Egg" in different languages

The entry has an etymology section, and the next stop by is Proto-Indogermanic root *h₂ōwyóm. … It has an internal possible etymology in the proto-language, and, most relevant to the question, a section of descendants. …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
0 votes

Determining the Age of a Word

As you already sketched out, it is a difficult question. Usually (e.g., in the OED) the age of a word in a certain language is defined by its first attestation. This works well for the large part of v …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
0 votes

Language origin of english words by usage

Once you have a satisfactory representative corpus, the rest is easy: pick a sample of enough (but not too many) words at random, determine their etymology, and count. …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Why do some (usually, first ones) ordinal numbers seem completely different from correspondi...

This question was indeed extensively studied in linguistic typology and a high level summary of results can be found in WALS chapter 53. It gives a good overview of possible systems of ordinal numbers …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
3 votes

How come the Romanian verb for love iubi does not originate from the Latin iubeo

Besides the rather large semantic shift from "to command" to "to love", there is another argument against the derivation of Romanian iubi from Latin iubeo: Latin iubeo is an irregular verb having the …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
4 votes
Accepted

Origin of the family name affix "tom"

Dutch tom is clearly cognate to High German zum which is a contraction of zu dem "to the". The German preposition zu can be used both in a static sense ("at") and in a directional sense ("to"). In Ger …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
1 vote

Is there a link between the words red and bread?

The phenomenon you just rediscovered is termed "exceptionlessness of sound laws": Words that have some common sound structure in a proto-language (here Proto-Germanic) tend to keep that commonness whi …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
1 vote

Are there clear exceptions to the alleged universality of "alphabet" as a term used in all l...

There exists the word "das Abece" (often written as Abc) as a Germanisation of alphabet in German, and it has some currency in elementary school teaching.
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
6 votes
Accepted

What is the the etymological origin of the name Calvin?

Calvin is indeed from the French, or further back from Latin calvus of the same meaning (cognate with calva skull as in "Calvary"). This epithet ended up becoming a family name. Family names in Europe …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
2 votes

Einbilden vs. Imagine

No. The Latin prefix is in- and before a vowel, it remains unchanged, giving *in-ago > inigo. But this is a verb, and not a noun, and there is no way to derive the noun imago from that verb. in- becom …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
2 votes

Verner's Law and 'ge-'

Morphological levelling is the force working against Verner's law in this situation. Note also that many forms with the ge- prefix may be created after Verner's law was active; there is a modern tren …
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
4 votes

Is there a term for the diminishment of intensity of meaning over time?

For the particular direction of semantic shift, I am aware of the term semantic bleaching. Semantic bleaching is part of the process of Grammaticalization.
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