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61-527: Dodgson is a surname. Its origin is "son of Roger", "Dodge" being a mediaeval nickname for Roger, as were Rodge and Hodge. Dodgson is also a given name, following the practice of using an ancestor's surname as a child's given name. Etymology For languages with a long written history , etymologists make use of texts, particularly texts about the language itself, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in meaning and form , or when and how they entered

122-419: A derivative . A derivative is one of the words which have their source in a root word, and were at some time created from the root word using morphological constructs such as suffixes, prefixes, and slight changes to the vowels or to the consonants of the root word. For example unhappy , happily , and unhappily are all derivatives of the root word happy . The terms root and derivative are used in

183-469: A suffixed etymon that was once meaningful, Latin castrum ' fort ' . Reflex is the name given to a descendant word in a daughter language, descended from an earlier language. For example, Modern English heat is the reflex of the Old English hǣtu. Rarely, this word is used in reverse, and the 'reflex' is actually the root word rather than the descendant word. However, this usage is usually filled by

244-925: A high standard with the German Dictionary of the Brothers Grimm . The successes of the comparative approach culminated in the Neogrammarian school of the late 19th century. Still in the 19th century, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used etymological strategies (principally and most famously in On the Genealogy of Morals , but also elsewhere) to argue that moral values have definite historical (specifically, cultural) origins where modulations in meaning regarding certain concepts (such as "good" and "evil") show how these ideas had changed over time—according to which value-system appropriated them. This strategy gained popularity in

305-876: A pattern different from the one that has been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival comparatives ) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation). In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. Some languages are isolating , and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative whose words tend to have many easily separable morphemes (such as Turkic languages ); others yet are inflectional or fusional because their inflectional morphemes are "fused" together (like some Indo-European languages such as Pashto and Russian ). That leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. A standard example of an isolating language

366-757: A possession relation, would consist of two words or even one word in many languages. Unlike most other languages, Kwak'wala semantic affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwak'wala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb): kwixʔid-i-da clubbed- PIVOT - DETERMINER bəgwanəma i -χ-a man- ACCUSATIVE - DETERMINER q'asa-s-is i otter- INSTRUMENTAL - 3SG - POSSESSIVE t'alwagwayu club kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəma i -χ-a q'asa-s-is i t'alwagwayu clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3SG-POSSESSIVE club "the man clubbed

427-399: A speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words: kwixʔid clubbed i-da-bəgwanəma PIVOT -the-man i χ-a-q'asa hit-the-otter s-is i -t'alwagwayu with-his i -club kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q'asa s-is i -t'alwagwayu clubbed PIVOT-the-man i hit-the-otter with-his i -club A central publication on this topic is

488-494: A truth ' , and the suffix -logia , denoting ' the study or logic of ' . The etymon refers to the predicate (i.e. stem or root ) from which a later word or morpheme derives. For example, the Latin word candidus , which means ' white ' , is the etymon of English candid . Relationships are often less transparent, however. English place names such as Winchester , Gloucester , Tadcaster share in different modern forms

549-418: A word form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word-form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem. Word-based morphology

610-549: Is (usually) a word-and-paradigm approach. The theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms or to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. Word-and-paradigm approaches are also well-suited to capturing purely morphological phenomena, such as morphomes . Examples to show

671-418: Is a morpheme plural using allomorphs such as -s , -en and -ren . Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, the two views are mixed in unsystematic ways so a writer may refer to "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme -s " in the same sentence. Lexeme-based morphology usually takes what is called an item-and-process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence,

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732-465: Is called "morphosyntax"; the term is also used to underline the fact that syntax and morphology are interrelated. The study of morphosyntax concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, and some approaches to morphosyntax exclude from its domain the phenomena of word formation, compounding, and derivation. Within morphosyntax fall the study of agreement and government . Above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog

793-433: Is considered to operate at a scale larger than phonology , which investigates the categories of speech sounds that are distinguished within a spoken language, and thus may constitute the difference between a morpheme and another. Conversely, syntax is concerned with the next-largest scale, and studies how words in turn form phrases and sentences. Morphological typology is a distinct field that categorises languages based on

854-602: Is known. The earliest of attested etymologies can be found in Vedic literature in the philosophical explanations of the Brahmanas , Aranyakas , and Upanishads . The analyses of Sanskrit grammar done by the previously mentioned linguists involved extensive studies on the etymology (called Nirukta or Vyutpatti in Sanskrit) of Sanskrit words, because the ancient Indians considered sound and speech itself to be sacred and, for them,

915-418: Is not at all clear-cut. There are many examples for which linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The next section will attempt to clarify the distinction. Word formation includes a process in which one combines two complete words, but inflection allows the combination of a suffix with a verb to change the latter's form to that of the subject of the sentence. For example: in

976-473: Is not readily obvious that the English word set is related to the word sit (the former is originally a causative formation of the latter). It is even less obvious that bless is related to blood (the former was originally a derivative with the meaning "to mark with blood"). Semantic change may also occur. For example, the English word bead originally meant "prayer". It acquired its modern meaning through

1037-519: Is often traced to Sir William Jones , a Welsh philologist living in India , who in 1782 observed the genetic relationship between Sanskrit , Greek and Latin . Jones published his The Sanscrit Language in 1786, laying the foundation for the field of Indo-European linguistics . The study of etymology in Germanic philology was introduced by Rasmus Christian Rask in the early 19th century and elevated to

1098-547: Is the most absurd, which derives this word from pons, and assigns the priests the title of bridge-makers. The sacrifices performed on the bridge were amongst the most sacred and ancient, and the keeping and repairing of the bridge attached, like any other public sacred office, to the priesthood. Isidore of Seville compiled a volume of etymologies to illuminate the triumph of religion. Each saint's legend in Jacobus de Varagine 's Legenda Aurea begins with an etymological discourse on

1159-399: Is to dogs as cat is to cats and dish is to dishes . In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning. In each pair, the first word means "one of X", and the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -s (or -es ) affixed to the second word, which signals the key distinction between singular and plural entities. One of

1220-487: The -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats , and in plurals such as dishes , a vowel is added before the -s . Those cases, in which the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", constitute allomorphy . Phonological rules constrain the sounds that can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in

1281-658: The conjugations of verbs and the declensions of nouns. Also, arranging the word forms of a lexeme into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense , aspect , mood , number , gender or case , organizes such. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables by using the categories of person (first, second, third); number (singular vs. plural); gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); and case (nominative, oblique, genitive). The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily but must be categories that are relevant to stating

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1342-429: The prosodic -phonological lack of freedom of bound morphemes . The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory. Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme, but other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are inflectional rules, but those of

1403-439: The syntactic rules of the language. Person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English because the language has grammatical agreement rules, which require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. Therefore, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs because the choice between both forms determines

1464-453: The 20th century, and philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida , have used etymologies to indicate former meanings of words to de-center the "violent hierarchies" of Western philosophy . Morphology (linguistics) In linguistics , morphology ( mor- FOL -ə-jee ) is the study of words , including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language . Most approaches to morphology investigate

1525-427: The addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. The word independent , for example, is derived from the word dependent by using the prefix in- , and dependent itself is derived from the verb depend . There is also word formation in the processes of clipping in which a portion of a word is removed to create a new one, blending in which two parts of different words are blended into one, acronyms in which each letter of

1586-402: The adoption of " loanwords " from other languages); word formation such as derivation and compounding ; and onomatopoeia and sound symbolism (i.e., the creation of imitative words such as "click" or "grunt"). While the origin of newly emerged words is often more or less transparent, it tends to become obscured through time due to sound change or semantic change. Due to sound change , it

1647-425: The analysis of morphological derivation within a language in studies that are not concerned with historical linguistics and that do not cross the language barrier. Etymologists apply a number of methods to study the origins of words, some of which are: Etymological theory recognizes that words originate through a limited number of basic mechanisms, the most important of which are language change , borrowing (i.e.,

1708-407: The associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list are very strong, they are not absolute. In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes . A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word such as independently , the morphemes are said to be in- , de- , pend , -ent , and -ly ; pend is the (bound) root and

1769-435: The effectiveness of word-based approaches are usually drawn from fusional languages , where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third-person plural". Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation since one says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-process theories, on

1830-448: The first to make a comprehensive analysis of linguistics and etymology. The study of Sanskrit etymology has provided Western scholars with the basis of historical linguistics and modern etymology. Four of the most famous Sanskrit linguists are: These linguists were not the earliest Sanskrit grammarians, however. They followed a line of ancient grammarians of Sanskrit who lived several centuries earlier like Sakatayana of whom very little

1891-545: The form of the verb that is used. However, no syntactic rule shows the difference between dog and dog catcher , or dependent and independent . The first two are nouns, and the other two are adjectives. An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms that are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, and there are no corresponding syntactic rules for word formation. The relationship between syntax and morphology, as well as how they interact,

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1952-513: The idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenated, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for item-and-arrangement theories and similar approaches. Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms: Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one Hockettian . For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but did not have meaning itself. For Hockett, morphemes are "meaning elements", not "form elements". For him, there

2013-411: The language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs] , which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. To "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃɪz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats : it depends on

2074-437: The language. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about forms that are too old for any direct information to be available. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method , linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots in many European languages, for example, can be traced back to

2135-449: The largest sources of complexity in morphology is that the one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, there are word form pairs like ox/oxen , goose/geese , and sheep/sheep whose difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern or is not signaled at all. Even cases regarded as regular, such as -s , are not so simple;

2196-576: The morphological features they exhibit. The history of ancient Indian morphological analysis dates back to the linguist Pāṇini , who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a constituency grammar . The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, including the Marāḥ Al-Arwāḥ of Aḥmad b. 'Alī Mas'ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE. The term "morphology"

2257-448: The new word catching . Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech , and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number , tense , and aspect . Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over the history of a language. The basic fields of linguistics broadly focus on language structure at different "scales". Morphology

2318-405: The new word represents a specific word in the representation (NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organization ), borrowing in which words from one language are taken and used in another, and coinage in which a new word is created to represent a new object or concept. A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are

2379-426: The obvious, and actual "bridge-builder": The priests, called Pontifices.... have the name of Pontifices from potens , powerful because they attend the service of the gods, who have power and command overall. Others make the word refer to exceptions of impossible cases; the priests were to perform all the duties possible; if anything lays beyond their power, the exception was not to be cavilled. The most common opinion

2440-714: The origin of the Indo-European language family . Even though etymological research originated from the philological tradition, much current etymological research is done on language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian . The word etymology is derived from the Ancient Greek word ἐτυμολογία ([ἐτυμολογία] Error: {{Transliteration}}: transliteration text not Latin script ( help ) ), itself from ἔτυμον ([ἔτυμον] Error: {{Transliteration}}: transliteration text not Latin script ( help ) ), meaning ' true sense or sense of

2501-462: The other hand, often break down in cases like these because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. The approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of

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2562-452: The other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes. In words such as dogs , dog is the root and the -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest and most naïve form, this way of analyzing word forms, called "item-and-arrangement", treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other (" concatenated ") like beads on a string. More recent and sophisticated approaches, such as distributed morphology , seek to maintain

2623-408: The otter with his club." That is, to a speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers - i-da ( PIVOT -'the'), referring to "man", attaches not to the noun bəgwanəma ("man") but to the verb; the markers - χ-a ( ACCUSATIVE -'the'), referring to otter , attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q'asa ('otter'), etc. In other words,

2684-433: The practice of counting the recitation of prayers by using beads. The search for meaningful origins for familiar or strange words is far older than the modern understanding of linguistic evolution and the relationships of languages, which began no earlier than the 18th century. From Antiquity through the 17th century, from Pāṇini to Pindar to Sir Thomas Browne , etymology had been a form of witty wordplay, in which

2745-418: The present indefinite, 'go' is used with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, but third-person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns causes 'goes' to be used. The '-es' is therefore an inflectional marker that is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word's grammatical category , but in the process of inflection,

2806-441: The quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme . Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon that, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding. There are three principal approaches to morphology and each tries to capture the distinctions above in different ways: While

2867-455: The relationship between two languages on the basis of similarity of grammar and lexicon was made in 1770 by the Hungarian, János Sajnovics , when he attempted to demonstrate the relationship between Sami and Hungarian (work that was later extended to the whole Finno-Ugric language family in 1799 by his fellow countryman, Samuel Gyarmathi ). The origin of modern historical linguistics

2928-510: The saint's name: Lucy is said of light, and light is beauty in beholding, after that S. Ambrose saith: The nature of light is such, she is gracious in beholding, she spreadeth over all without lying down, she passeth in going right without crooking by right long line; and it is without dilation of tarrying, and therefore it is showed the blessed Lucy hath beauty of virginity without any corruption; essence of charity without disordinate love; rightful going and devotion to God, without squaring out of

2989-402: The same language. Although they have the same etymological root, they tend to have different phonological forms, and to have entered the language through different routes. A root is the source of related words within a single language (no language barrier is crossed). Similar to the distinction between etymon and root , a nuanced distinction can sometimes be made between a descendant and

3050-405: The same lexeme eat . Eat and Eater , on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different concepts. Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin , one way to express the concept of ' NOUN-PHRASE 1 and NOUN-PHRASE 2 ' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to

3111-433: The second kind are rules of word formation . The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). The distinction between inflection and word formation

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3172-536: The second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and". An extreme level of the theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language. In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes , instead of by independent "words". The three-word English phrase, "with his club", in which 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes

3233-408: The sixteenth century. Etymologicum genuinum is a grammatical encyclopedia edited at Constantinople in the ninth century, one of several similar Byzantine works. The thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea , as written by Jacobus de Varagine , begins each vita of a saint with a fanciful excursus in the form of an etymology. The Sanskrit linguists and grammarians of ancient India were

3294-436: The structure of words in terms of morphemes , which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning . Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form

3355-535: The supposed origins of words were creatively imagined to satisfy contemporary requirements; for example, the Greek poet Pindar (born in approximately 522 BCE) employed inventive etymologies to flatter his patrons. Plutarch employed etymologies insecurely based on fancied resemblances in sounds . Isidore of Seville 's Etymologiae was an encyclopedic tracing of "first things" that remained uncritically in use in Europe until

3416-427: The term etymon instead. A reflex will sometimes be described simply as a descendant , derivative or derived from an etymon (but see below). Cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Doublets or etymological twins or twinlings (or possibly triplets, and so forth) are specifically cognates within

3477-426: The volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of "word" in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic , possessing the grammatical features of independent words but

3538-464: The way; right long line by continual work without negligence of slothful tarrying. In Lucy is said, the way of light. Etymology in the modern sense emerged in the late 18th-century European academia, within the context of the wider " Age of Enlightenment ", although preceded by 17th century pioneers such as Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn , Gerardus Vossius , Stephen Skinner , Elisha Coles , and William Wotton . The first known systematic attempt to prove

3599-534: The word never changes its grammatical category. There is a further distinction between two primary kinds of morphological word formation: derivation and compounding . The latter is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form. Dog catcher , therefore, is a compound, as both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right but are subsequently treated as parts of one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, but

3660-679: The words of the sacred Vedas contained deep encoding of the mysteries of the soul and God. One of the earliest philosophical texts of the Classical Greek period to address etymology was the Socratic dialogue Cratylus ( c.  360 BCE ) by Plato . During much of the dialogue, Socrates makes guesses as to the origins of many words, including the names of the gods. In his Odes Pindar spins complimentary etymologies to flatter his patrons. Plutarch ( Life of Numa Pompilius ) spins an etymology for pontifex , while explicitly dismissing

3721-473: Was introduced into linguistics by August Schleicher in 1859. The term "word" has no well-defined meaning. Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form . Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals . For instance, the lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate . Eat and eats are thus considered different word-forms belonging to

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