A Set on edgi
Every Word Is a Fossil
'Salary' really does come from the Latin for salt. Nobody knows why. Every word you know is hiding a story like that.
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Etymology
Etymology is the scientific study of the origins of words and how their sounds and meanings change over time.
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Loanword
A loanword is a word that one language adopts directly from another without translating it into existing native roots.
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History of English
How Anglo-Saxon roots, Viking grammar, Norman French vocabulary, and the Great Vowel Shift formed modern English.
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Comparative method
Linguists use the comparative method to trace systematic sound changes across modern languages and reconstruct prehistoric ancestral tongues.
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Sound Shift
A sound shift is a permanent change in how a speech sound is pronounced across an entire language over time.
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Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic is the unrecorded ancient ancestor of English, German, and Norse, reconstructed purely through sound shifts and early loans.
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Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European is the prehistoric, unwritten ancestor language of modern tongues like English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindi.