Category: Language & Communication
The bulk of our literary language is Latin, and consists of words either borrowed directly or taken from "learned" French forms. The every-day vocabulary of the less educated is of Old English, commonly called Anglo-Saxon, origin; and from the same source comes what we may cal...
The bulk of our literary language is Latin, and consists of words either borrowed directly or taken from "learned" French forms. The every-day vocabulary of the less educated is...
2. Chapter 2In assigning to a word a foreign origin, it is necessary to show how contact between the two languages has taken place, or the particular reasons which have brought about the bo...
3. Chapter 3In a sense, all nomenclature, apart from purely scientific language, is popular. But real meanings are often so rapidly obscured that words become mere labels, and cease to call...
4. Chapter 4A very large number of wares are named from the places from which they come. This is especially common in the case of woven fabrics, and the origin is often obvious, e.g., _arra...
5. Chapter 5The history of a word has to be studied from the double point of view of sound and sense, or, to use more technical terms, phonetics and semantics. In the logical order of thing...
6. Chapter 6We have all noticed the fantastic way in which ideas are linked together in our thoughts. One thing suggests another with which it is accidentally associated in memory, the seco...
7. Chapter 7The convenient name semantics has been applied of late to the science of meanings, as distinguished from phonetics, the science of sound. The comparative study of languages enab...
8. Chapter 8Every expression that we employ, apart from those that are connected with the most rudimentary objects and actions, is a metaphor, though the original meaning is dulled by const...
9. Chapter 9The sound, spelling, and even the meaning of a word are often perverted by influences to which the collective name of folk-etymology has been given. I here use the term to inclu...
10. Chapter 10The largest class of doublets is formed by those words of Latin origin which have been introduced into the language in two forms, the popular form through Anglo-Saxon or Old Fre...
11. Chapter 11Modern English contains some six or seven hundred pairs or sets of homonyms, _i.e._, of words identical in sound and spelling but differing in meaning and origin. The _New Engli...
12. Chapter 12In the study of family names we come across very much the same phenomena as in dealing with other words. They are subject to the same phonetic accidents and to the distortions o...
13. Chapter 13Romance and Germanic etymology dates from the middle of the 19th century, and is associated especially with the names of two great Germans, Friedrich Diez, who published his _Wo...