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Etymology (/ ˌ ɛ t ɪ ˈ m ɒ l ə dʒ i /, ET-im-OL-ə-jee [1]) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. [2] In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. [1]
The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the 14th century BC in the town of Ugarit on Syria's northern coast. [23] Tablets found there bear over one thousand cuneiform signs, but these signs are not Babylonian and there are only thirty distinct characters. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order.
An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. [1]
The study of liturgy, a set of rituals that are performed, usually by a religion; liturgics. logology: The field of recreational linguistics, an activity that encompasses a wide variety of word games and wordplay. The study of all aspects of science (the science of science) The study of words in search for divine truth. The study of logos.
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. [1] [2] Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning.
Onomastics (or onomatology in older texts) is the study of proper names, including their etymology, history, and use. An alethonym ('true name') or an orthonym ('real name') is the proper name of the object in question, the object of onomastic study. Scholars studying onomastics are called onomasticians.
Etymological Bibliography of Take Our Word For It, the only Weekly Word-origin Webzine; Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (IEED) at Leiden University; Internet Archive Search: Etymological Dictionary Etymological Dictionaries in English at the Internet archive
For broader coverage of this topic, see Writing. A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing was invented during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each writing system invented without prior knowledge of writing gradually evolved from a system of proto-writing that ...