Etymology.
Etymology explores the history and development of individual words - the origins of a languages
lexical items.
It asks a question you're likely familiar with.
That question is: where did this word come from?
You've probably encountered etymologies when someone explained the meaning of a word or
when you sought out the origin of a word for yourself.
As a linguistic study, this question is approached methodically, so it requires that we understand
the methods that we use to discover word origins.
Specifically, etymology requires an understanding of the parts of words, their pronunciation
and grammar components.
So you'll need some understanding of phonology and morphology.
Etymology is also a diachronic process.
What this means is that etymology is a function of a language's change over time, so etymology
will make more sense if you're already versed in the fundamentals of historical linguistics,
if you're aware of key concepts like cognates and borrowings, reconstruction of proto-languages
and discussions about what is a language and what is a dialect.
We can start to build etymologies.
Uh, for the etymology of a particular word, we'll need to know about language change over
time in general and the history of change in a particular language that we're analyzing.
We'll also need to know the history of borrowing - borrowed words are called loanwords or loans
- uh, borrowing into that particular language, and, in turn, the historical changes that
those source languages (that were the source of the borrowings) underwent.
Notice that words are often borrowed or inherited from non-standard forms of a language, and
that adds to the complexity.
Take for instance, uh, medieval Norman French borrowings into English, like the word 'chief',
which is not the same as the modern French word 'chef', or the interesting case of dialect
mixing which accounts for the word pair 'shirt' and 'skirt' in Modern English.
So, with those complexities in mind, let's discuss how we trace the path of a word as
its sound and its form change.
As much as is possible, we rely on historical attestation.
Here we expect our etymology to account for the evidence, that is, the word that we're
tracing as it was actually used throughout its history.
For example, the modern English word 'queen' goes back to an earlier 'quene' in Middle
English.
This word is attested in Chaucer.
'Quene', in turn, derives from Old English 'cwen' attested in Beowulf.
Here we can say that the etymon (or source word) of queen is the Old English cwen.
But we aren't restricted by the attested evidence.
There are two ways to trace a more distant origin.
First, we might discover that a word was influenced by or borrowed from another dialect or another
language, like the English word 'chief', which was borrowed from French.
In this case, our etymology can continue in that source language.
Second, we can increase our time depth by comparing related languages and engaging in
the process of historical reconstructions, a clever intellectual development I introduced
in the lesson on historical linguistics.
Therefore, as much as possible, our etymology will take into account the history of borrowing
and influence, and will terminate at the earliest reconstructible form of a word, not the earliest
attested form.
For example, the Old English word 'cwēn' can be compared to other Germanic words like
the Gothic 'qens' or the Old Norse 'kvæn', allowing us to reconstruct the Proto-Germanic
ancestral form as *kwēniz.
When we compare the Proto-Germanic word to cognates in other non-Germanic Indo-European
languages, like the Ancient Greek word 'gyne' and the Sanskrit 'gna', we can begin to reconstruct
a Proto-Indo-European root like *gun- or *gwēn-.
We'll then see that Grimm's Law applies to all Germanic languages, which changed voiceless
stops to fricatives and voiced stops to voiceless stops, giving us a root *kwēn- beginning
with the voiceless sound 'k' rather than the voiced 'g' or /g/.
Now when I said that Grimm's Law applies to all Germanic languages, that doesn't mean
that it still impacts modern languages, but, like all sound laws, it affected words at
one point in history, in this case in Proto-Germanic.
So let's review what we've done here.
We found the earliest attested form of 'queen' in English, compared it to words in related
Germanic languages to trace the word to a reconstructed Proto-Germanic word, and compared
Proto-Germanic to related Indo-European languages to trace the word even further back to a reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European root word.
Along the way, we payed attention to sound changes.
Notice that you find an asterisk next to reconstructed forms, and also notice how the derivational
path is represented visually.
Kweniz becomes cwen which becomes quene, or quene comes from cwen which comes from kweniz.
It's also crucial to understand morphology to know what kind of word you're dealing with.
Especially key here is word formation, the way affixes are added to roots to form new
words (which is derivation) or how words are compounded to form new words (which is compounding).
Inflectional morphemes are certainly considered, but their really part of the grammar or structure
of a language, while etymology often focuses on content words or content morphemes.
An example of why morphology matters when doing etymology.
When we traced the history of queen, we arrived at a Proto-Germanic word *kwēn-iz, which
has an inflectional suffix -iz attached to the noun.
In a separate instance, you might be doing the etymology of, say, the word 'illogical'.
That word has a root log- and three derivational affixes: a suffix -ic, a suffix -al and a
prefix in- (which assimilated to il-).
To do justice to the etymology of these words, you'll need to understand and know the derivation
of these morphemes.
In the next video, I'll talk about the role of semantics, particularly meaning change,
in etymology, and I'll also touch on basic conventions followed when presenting an etymology.
Hope this has been helpful and see you then.