Etymology
[1] Most directly tied to historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, it additionally draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to attempt a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings and changes that a word (and its related parts) carries throughout its history.
English place names such as Winchester, Gloucester, Tadcaster share different forms of a suffix that originated as the Latin castrum 'fort'.
[9] 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.
Etymology has been a form of witty wordplay, in which the supposed origins of words were creatively imagined to satisfy contemporary requirements.
For example, the Greek poet Pindar (born c. 522 BCE) employed inventive etymologies to flatter his patrons.
Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae was an encyclopedic tracing of "first things" that remained uncritically in use in Europe until the sixteenth century.
The 13th-century Golden Legend, as written by Jacobus de Voragine, begins each hagiography of a saint with a fanciful excursus in the form of an etymology.
One of the earliest philosophical texts of the Classical Greek period to address etymology was the Socratic dialogue Cratylus (c. 360 BCE) by Plato.
Each saint's legend in Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend begins with an etymological discourse on their 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 the way; right long line by continual work without negligence of slothful tarrying.
[11] Etymology in the modern sense emerged in the late 18th-century European academia, in the context of the Age of Enlightenment, although preceded by 17th-century pioneers such as Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, Gerardus Vossius, Stephen Skinner, Elisha Coles, and William Wotton.
[12] The origin of modern historical linguistics is often traced to William Jones, a Welsh philologist living in India, who in 1782 observed the genetic relationship between Greek and Latin.
[13] Although they sent many Sanskrit-related texts to the Bibliothèque du roi, such as literary translations, grammars, dictionaries, and other works, the Jesuit Missionaries in the Carnatic Region between 1695-1762, including Jean Calmette, Coeurdoux, Gargam, Jean François Pons, and others, have only recently begun receiving more attention in modern scholarship for their early contributions to fields like Indo-European Studies, historical linguistics, and comparative philology.
This strategy gained popularity in 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.
