Etymology: An Old Discipline in New Contexts (original) (raw)
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Semantic Etymology: An innovative approach to Historical Linguistics
Bharatha Pathrika (Trilingual Research Journal) ISSN 2277-5471, 2018
ABSTRACT Semantic etymology (a word coined by Bronkhorst), as opposed to Historical etymology, attempts to elucidate the meaning of a word and gain information thence; thus, in effect, covering a a deeper and wider area than historical. Moreover, since word meanings are involved, semantic etymologising needs to be done with actual words that existed and meaningfully used in a language and not hypothetical ones belonging to any ‘Proto-language’. The present paper explains with examples how this approach can enrich the field of etymology in the case of Sanskrit; and thus points to avenue of research in connection between Dravidian and Indo-European languages.
NICOLAE STANCIU, ETYMOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISTION, 2020, IJIRES 1705 FINAL
Extensive research has shown great interest in the origins and evolution of Turkic cultures and languages underlying the importance of history, language and religion in building the ethnicity of different nations in Eastern Europe. However, less attention was paid to semantic convergences, divergences and evolutions of lexical items in the conceptual metaphors and phrases recovered in Romanian culture through Turkish and other south slavic intermediaries. Accidentally encountered in etymological dictionaries and studies, the Turkic elements have not benefited yet from a multidisciplinary research meant to point out the lines of continuity between old Turkic (Pechenges, Cuman and Tatar), those of Ottoman Turkish and their reverberations in Romanian language. In fact, words almost exclusively labelled as Turkish or those with unknown and multiple etymology, preserved in Romanian as relics found in various stylistically registers (academic, archaic, colloquial, popular, regional) as well as in anthroponomy and toponymy, have been recovered in the folklore and literature of the 19th to the 21st centuries. These have been found disguised in metaphorical expressions and symbols considered relevant for the spirituality of this multicultural space. Integrated into an evolution perspective, the concepts and metaphors analysed and interpreted within this article belong to extended cultural areas, and use symbols common to extremely various linguistic groups. Accepting multiple origins and following their semantic evolution in etymological charts designed for interpreting meaning from basic to abstract and semantic deviation found at secondary level or in metaphors, this article constitutes an attempt to design a hermeneutical method based on archaeo-and historical linguistics, etymological confluences and stratigraphy and to use the analysed lexis in the content of classes taught for the students in Kazakhstan. However, the traditional principle of connection between the phonetic body and meaning as unified parts of conceptual-semantic matrix is sustained, combined with the modern one pointing out the role of etymology in underlining the ethnic features of both nations. Keywords -Etymology, Second Language, Multidisciplinary Science.
The Lexical Semantic Framework (LSF, Lieber, 2004) is concerned with the study of the semantics of word-formation processes. The central goal of LSF is to characterize the meaning of simple lexemes and affixes and to show how these meanings can be integrated in the creation of complex words. LSF offers a systematic treatment of issues that figure prominently in the study of word formation: (a) The polysemy question: why do derivational affixes often exhibit polysemy (e.g. agent, instrument, experiencer, stimulus, patient/theme nouns in-er, as in driver, opener, hearer, pleaser, keeper)? (b) The multiple-affix question: why are there affixes that create the same kind of derived words (i.e. bother and-ant create agent nouns, e.g. writer, accountant)? (c) The zero-derivation question: how do we account for zero-affixation, that is, semantic change with no (overt) formal change (i.e. " conversion ")? (d) The form and meaning mismatches question: why are there instances where the form and meaning correlation is often not one-to-one? LSF has its source in a confluence of research approaches that follow a decompositional approach to meaning and, thus, defines simple lexemes and affixes by way of a systematic representation that is achieved via a constrained formal language that enforces consistency of annotation. Lexical-semantic representations in LSF consist of two parts: the Semantic/Grammatical Skeleton and the Semantic/Pragmatic Body (henceforth 'skeleton' and 'body' respectively). The skeleton is comprised of features that are of relevance to the syntax. These features act as functions and may take arguments. Functions and arguments of a skeleton are hierarchically arranged. The body encodes all those aspects of meaning that are perceptual, cultural, and encyclopedic. Features in LSF are used in (a) a cross-categorial, (b) an equipollent, and (c) a priva-tive way. This means that they are used to account for the distinction between the major ontological categories, may have a binary (i.e. positive or negative) value and may or may not form part of the skeleton of a given lexeme. In order to account for the fact that several distinct parts integrate into a single referential unit that projects its arguments to the syntax, LSF makes use of the Principle of Co-indexation. Co-indexation is a device needed in order to tie together the arguments that come with different parts of a complex word to yield only those arguments that are syntactically active. LSF has an important impact on the study of the morphology-lexical semantics interface and provides a unitary theory of meaning in word formation.
Etymological Analysis of English Words
I have attempted in this paper to describe loan words in English and etymology of English words. Etymology as defined by Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (2010) is the study of the origin of words, historical perspectives, and modification in the meanings of these words. The etymological analysis of the words helps one recognize that words originate through a limited number of fundamental parameters such as borrowing the words from other languages; formation of words such as derivation and compounding; and onomatopoeia and sound symbolism. Of course, the English vocabulary consists of two types: the native and borrowed words. Interestingly, the number of borrowed words from different languages and sources is greater than the collection of native words.
Diachronic Analysis of Word Formation as Basic Studies for Etymologisation Iris Metsmägi
2016
The paper focuses on some problems of word formation in Estonian and Finnic, which are etymologically relevant. Diachronic derivational relations may not be ascertained by the synchronic approach, e.g. either due to sound changes in the stem (cf. Estonian kõõl-us ‘tendon, string’ and keel ‘tongue; language; string’), or because a root does not occur separately or is rare. A suffix may have been dropped from active use or is subject to extensive variation, e.g., many Estonian verb stems containing the component -ka, -ki, -ku etc. (kilka-ma ‘to scream’) could be interpreted as derivatives with respective suffixes (kil-ka-ma, cf. kil-ise-ma ‘to clink’). The interpretation of the morphological structure of loanwords is often complicated. The loanwords may contain derivational suffixes of the donor language, sometimes even resembling genuine ones, e.g. Estonian lusikas, Finnish lusikka ’spoon’ does not contain historically the Finnic suffix -k(k)a but is borrowed from Old Russian lŭžĭka....
Introduction to Part 2: Etymology (with Glenn W. Most and Michele Loporcaro)
Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship: Thinking in Many Tongues (Brill), 2023
The present chapter gathers under the heading “etymology” premodern texts from different ages and places that all had a tremendous and lasting impact on the intellectual life of the countless people who were brought up in the respective cultures. The common denominator of all those texts is that they deal with the subject of the origin and meaning of individual words. The scholarly practice of etymology seems to have been very widespread geographically and historically in earlier times, and it continues to remain an object of great interest for ordinary people throughout the world even today.1 The different kinds of spoken languages and writing systems that have been involved and the different roles and ambitions of scholars in their cultures have led to considerable variation in the nature of the practice. Moreover, in the past two centuries, as the historical study of language has developed into an academic discipline, at first in Europe but then also in those other parts of the world most influenced by European ideas, a new science of etymology has become established that differs radically in theory and method from all earlier practices.2 During the earlier period, plurilingualism played only sometimes, but not always, a decisive role in analyzing and understanding language diversity on the level of the individual word; but in later forms during that period plurilingualism tended to become much more prominent, and it has become an indispensable foundation of more recent scientific practice. The purpose of this introduction is to sketch out briefly a panoramic overview of the changing nature of etymology in the context of the reality of plurilingualism, considering its cultural and linguistic variations and its historical development, especially in premodern times, and thereby to set into a wider context the readings that are provided in this part …