www.ancient-origins.net
Five Common English Words We Don’t Know the Origins of – Including ‘Boy’ and ‘Dog’
By Francesco Perono Cacciafoco/The Conversation
The naming process, the act of naming the items of the world, is as old as the first words spoken by our ancestors. We can reconstruct the stages of this process through etymology, which studies the historical development of the lexicon of a language.
English words tell a lot of stories. To get back to their origins, linguists apply the comparative method. 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.
In the comparative method, linguists compare cognates (the same words in different-but-related languages, like mother in English, māter in Latin, and mutter in German) and reconstruct the ways these words were pronounced by ancient speakers.
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.
Read moreSection: NewsHistoryAncient TraditionsRead Later
New Posts (Home)
ChatBox
Popular Posts 
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
