Five Common English Words We Don’t Know the Origins of – Including ‘Boy’ and ‘Dog’
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By <a href="
https://theconversation.com/profiles/francesco-perono-cacciafoco-1538059" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">
Francesco Perono Cacciafoco[/url]
/The Conversation</p>
<p>The naming process, the act of naming the items of the world, is as old as the first words spoken by our? <a href="
https://www.britannica.com/topic/language/Linguistic-change" rel="nofollow">ancestors[/url]. We can reconstruct the stages of this process through etymology, which studies the historical development of the lexicon of a language.</p>
<p>English words tell a lot of stories. To get back to their origins, linguists apply the? <a href="
https://www.britannica.com/science/linguistics/The-comparative-method" rel="nofollow">comparative method[/url]. Languages are not isolated entities, but belong to linguistic families – English is a west Germanic language from the Indo-European family, for example – and their vocabularies are connected.</p>
<p>In the comparative method, linguists compare cognates (the same words in different-but-related languages, like?
mother? in English,?
m?ter? in Latin, and?
mutter? in German) and reconstruct the ways these words were pronounced by ancient speakers.</p>
<p>By doing this, linguists give a voice to our ancestors, travelling back in time towards prehistoric ages with no written records. It’s difficult and complex, but very cool stuff.</p>
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