The Daily Etymology Appendix (v. 1)

Ablaut – A regular variation of vowels in the stem of words occurring in Indo-European languages. Examples in English can be found in strong (irregular) verbs, like ring – rang – rung. Words with ablaut are usually among the oldest, going back to proto-Indo-European ancestors.

Adstratum – (or adstrate) The type of stratum that influence by proximity without there being a clear difference in prestige.

Affix – A morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Two common types are prefixes, attached before the stem, and suffixes, attached after the stem.

Anglo-Frisian – One of the West Germanic languages spoken by the tribes that came to England in the 5th century.

Anglo-Norman – The dialect of Old Norman spoken on the British Islands after the Norman invasion 1066. As it was the language of the ruling class, it had a big influence on the English language during the Middle English period.

Asterisk – An * is added to a word to signify that it is reconstructed, that is it is not attested.

Attested – Means we have written evidence of a word from period sources. When a language doesn't have any, or very few written records, many words have to be reconstructed, as there is no attestation for them.

Calque – See semantic loan.

Celtic languages – A group of Indo-European languages spoken over much of Europe before and during the Roman Empire. Before the Anglo-Saxon invasion, celtic languages were, together with Latin, the languages of the British Islands. Some celtic loanwords exist in modern English, and Welsh and Cornish are the descendants of these, still existing as minority languages.

Clipping – A shortening of a word, without changing meaning or part of speech. Eg. admin from administration/administrator.

Cognate – Sets of words in different languages inherited from a common ancestor, etymon, in a parent language. Not to be confused with loanwords.

Comparative linguistics – A branch of linguistic science concerned with finding historical relatedness between languages through comparison. It’s through such comparisons that language families are defined, and proto-languages are reconstructed.

Compound – A word derived by joining two or more stems.

Conversion – when a new word is formed from an existing word without there being any changes to that word. Also known as zero derivation. A common type in English is many cases of verbification, that is when a verb is formed from an existing noun, adjective, or other word. The noun mail becomes the verb to mail, without any changes.

Derivation – The process when a new word is formed from an existing word. It can be done through attaching affixes or by conversion. It is not the same as inflection or compounding.

Derivative – A word that is formed from another word through derivation.

Dialect – A variety of a language that exists within that language and is mutually intelligible by the speakers of that language. Dialects exist on a continuum, and sometimes the distinction between a dialect and a separate language can be muddled because of social, cultural, historical, and legal reasons.

Doublet – Two or more words in a language that have a common etymological root, but have entered the language through different routes.

Etymology – The study of the origin and evolution of words across time.

Etymon – An etymon is a word or other form from which a later word is derived.

Frankish language – A West Germanic language spoken by the Franks in the 5th to 9th centuries. It has influenced the vocabulary of French, and by that way also English. It is poorly attested and therefore known mainly in reconstructed form.

Germanic languages – A branch of the Indo-European language family, descending from a mainly reconstructed proto language, known as proto-Germanic. The Germanic languages are normally divided into North Germanic, West Germanic, and East Germanic languages. The East Germanic subdivision is extinct. English is a West Germanic language.

Great Vowel Shift – A sound change that began during the Middle English period (c. 1300) and continued into the Early Modern English period (c. 1600). This led to the gradual change over time of how the long vowels in English were pronounced. This is part of the explanation for why English pronunciation and spelling deviate so much.

Grimm's Law – A sound change in Proto-Germanic where certain consonants shifted from PIE.
*/bʰ/ > /b/
*/dʰ/ > /d/
*/gʰ/ > /g/
*/b/ > /p/
*/d/ > /t/
*/g/ > /k/
*/p/ > /f/
*/t/ > /θ, ð/
*/k/ > /h/
The result can be seen by comparing English and Latin cognates, ie. fish vs. piscis, father vs. pater, and heart vs. cor (PIE *peysk-, *ph₂tḗr,
and *kord).

Homonym – Two or more words with different meanings, but the same pronunciation and/or spelling.

Indo-European languages - The language family of most existing languages in Europe, as well as in Central Asia and large parts of the Indian subcontinent. Almost half of all people speak an Indo-European language, and it includes hundreds of living and dead languages. The Indo-European languages are assumed to come from a common proto-language, Proto-Indo-European, spoken by a people in Eurasia sometime in Late Neolithic period (pre-5,000 B.C.), and into the Copper Age (c. 5,000 - 2,000 B.C.) and the beginning of the Bronze Age. Their origin is disputed and the language is reconstructed through comparative linguistics. Almost all present languages in Europe are Indo-European, and are divided into the Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, and Italic language groups. In Asia, the Indo-Iranian languages belong to the family. Only a few indigenous non-Indo-European languages are still spoken in Europe, like Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Basque, and the Turkic languages.

Inflection – The process of a word being modified to express grammatical categories (tense, case, number, etc.) This can be done through affixes (like the -s suffix for number or the -ed suffix for past tense), or other changes like ablaut. It is different from derivation as the inflected word is still the same word as before and not a new one.

Language family – A group of languages descending from a common ancestral proto-language. Most European languages, including English, belong to the Indo-European language family, descended from proto-Indo-European.

Learned borrowing – A loanword that was borrowed directly on purpose, instead of through normal language contact, from another language, especially classical languages such as Latin, Ancient Greek or Sanskrit, and which has not undergone significant reshaping due to sound change or analogy with inherited terms. Such borrowings are thus often unadapted.

Loanword – A word that has not been formed within a language nor inherited from an ancestral language, but is borrowed from another language.

Metathesis – The transposition of sounds or syllables in a word. A sound change in which two sounds or groups of sounds exchange position in a word. A form showing metathesis is described as metathetic. The sounds may be adjacent, as in ax, the metathetic form of the verb ask, or farther apart, as in Spanish palabra from Latin parabola.

Middle English – The form of English used in the period of c. 1150-1500, following Old English and preceding Modern English. There were big changes in the pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and orthography. There was influence from Old French, especially Anglo-Norman, but also from Latin. During this period there was a sound change which was significant, known as the Great Vowel Shift. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is perhaps the most famous example of Middle English.

Modern English – The language period following Middle English, from c. 1500 and to present day. It is the form of the language that is mostly intelligible by the contemporary language users, concerning pronunciation, spelling, and vocabulary. The invention of the printing press, and increased literacy, led to standardization of orthography. The Great Vowel Shift, which had started in the Middle English period, was completed. It is usually divided into Early Modern English, c. 1500–1700, and Late Modern English, which is from c. 1700 to today. The most famous examples of Early Modern English are the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.

Morpheme – The smallest unit in language that has an independent meaning. It can be roots or affixes.

Neologism – A newly formed word that has achieved popularity and/or recognition in a language. The acceptance of neologisms is often the cause of disagreement and conflict between different language users.

OEDOxford English Dictionary

Old English – The first period of the English language, from before c. 1150. Formed from Old Saxon and Anglo-Frisian after the Germanic invasion of England from the 5th century. Originally written with a runic alphabet, but later the Latin alphabet was adopted. Old English is generally not intelligible to modern English users. In its early forms it had several distinct dialects for different kingdoms before England became unified, as different tribes settled in different parts of England. The most famous work in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Followed by Middle English, after changes under influence of Anglo-Norman.

Old French – The Romance language spoken in the northern parts of present day France c. 750–1400. Old French had a large dialectal variation. One of those dialects was Old Norman. Although a Romance language, it had Germanic influence from the Frankish language.

Old Norman – The dialect of Old French spoken in the French region of Normandy. Through the Norman invasion in 1066, it came to have a big influence on Middle English.

Old Norse – A North Germanic language spoken in Scandinavia, in Iceland, and on the Faroe Islands c. 700–1350. Through the Viking invasions of England, and the Danelaw 978–954, it came to influence Old English, especially in the north eastern part of England. Besides loanwords, like window and skirt, Old Norse can be traced in many English place names, like those including -by, -thorp, and -kirk.

Old Saxon – One of the West Germanic languages spoken by tribes that came to England in the 5th century, from areas in present day Denmark, northern Germany, and the Netherlands. It was closely related to Anglo-Frisian, and together they were the basis for the Old English language.

Onomatopoeia – The process of forming words by imitating the sound of that which the word is to signify. Eg. cuckoo.

Orthography – The conventions of writing a language. Includes spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and other norms for expressing language in writing.

Oxford English Dictionary – A historical dictionary of the English language, published by the Oxford University Press. Work started in 1857, and the first volume was published in 1884. The first edition was completed in 1928. A second edition was published in 1989. Today it is published online, and the digital version is continually updated. The editors collect attestations for the words in texts from different times. In this way it is possible to see when a word appears in the language, and how it has changed through history regarding pronunciation, spelling, and meaning.

PIE – The Proto-Indo-European language

Prefix – An affix added in front of a root.

Proto-Germanic – The proto language of the Germanic languages.

Proto-Indo-European language – The proto language of the Indo-European language family.

Proto language – The ancestral language of a number of related languages.

Reconstructed language – A postulated dead language that has been fully or mostly reconstructed through comparative linguistics, as the language has no or few attestations. A reconstructed word is written with an asterisk ‘*\’ to signify it is reconstructed, like PIE *dyeu-ph2tēr (“sky father”, the ancestor of the names for the gods Zeus and Jupiter.)

Root – The basic unit of a word, the part that carries the word’s meaning. It is the foundation upon which a word is built. Sometimes the root is the entire word.

Romance languages – The languages that have descended from Vulgar Latin. Includes French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Semantic loan – Also known as calque. A process of borrowing semantic meaning from another language, where the complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change is that its meaning is extended to include another meaning its existing translation has in the lending language.

Sound change – The process for how pronunciation changes in a language over time. As there exists regularities in how these take place, they can be used by linguists to study the history of languages. See Great Vowel Change, Grimm's Law, and umlaut.

Stem – The part of a word that carries the word’s grammatical meaning. A stem may consist of a single root, of two roots forming a compound stem, or of a root (or stem) and one or more derivational affixes forming a derived stem.

Stratum – (or strate) A layer of language influenced or influencing through contact as a result of migration. The languages influencing each other are classified as substratum, superstratum, or adstratum.

Substratum – (or substrate) The type of stratum which is influenced by an intrusive superstratum language.

Superstratum – (or superstrate) The type of stratum which influences a substratum by invasion or colonisation.

Suffix – An affix added after a root.

Umlaut – Also known as I-mutation. A sound change in Germanic languages where the front vowel in a word is changed by influence of the following vowel. This started to happen in different West and North Germanic languages around 500 AD. The study of umlaut makes it possible to study the historical development of Germanic languages, and helps date different words. Example: Proto-Germanic *lūsiz → English lice (plural of louse).

Unadapted borrowing – A loanword that has not been conformed to the morpho-syntactic or phonological rules of the target language. For example, English cubiculum is an unadapted borrowing from Latin cubiculum, while English cubicle is a standard borrowing from the same Latin word. Unadapted borrowings are often learned borrowings.

Verbification – The form of conversion where a verb is formed from an existing noun or adjective. It is a very common form of conversion in English, and many of the most common verbs have formed this way. Eg. mail, drink, dress, fool.

Vulgar Latin – The spoken variants of the Latin language, that differed so much from the formal Classical Latin that it can be considered different languages. It had many different dialects in different parts of the Latin speaking parts of Europe. In the Middle Ages, Vulgar Latin started to become new languages that were the predecessors of the modern Romance languages.

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Pub: 27 May 2024 18:38 UTC
Edit: 07 Apr 2025 06:12 UTC
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