"It is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes."
The study of the history and origin of words.
Word Roots and Affixes: Understanding the building blocks of words, which are known as word roots, prefixes, and suffixes, is crucial to understanding their meanings and origins.
Morphology: Morphology refers to the study of how words are formed, including their structure, meaning, and changes over time.
Historical Linguistics: Historical linguistics is the study of how languages have changed over time, including their evolution, relatedness, and the migration of populations.
Language Families: Languages that share a common ancestor are known as language families. Learning about these relationships can provide insights into the similarities and differences between languages.
Lexicography: The practice of compiling, editing, and writing dictionaries is known as lexicography. Etymology is often an essential aspect of lexicography.
Linguistic Anthropology: Linguistic anthropology is the study of language in its social and cultural context. It examines how language shapes and reflects culture as well as how cultural context affects language use.
Semantic Change: Semantic change is the process by which the meaning of words shifts over time. Understanding how and why such change occurs can provide insights into a language's history.
Borrowing and Loanwords: When a word is adopted from one language into another, it is known as a borrowing or a loanword. Learning about these processes can help us understand the cultural and historical connections between languages.
Proto-Languages: A proto-language is a hypothetical reconstructed language from which other languages are said to have originated. Studying proto-languages can provide insights into a language's historical roots.
Comparative Analysis: A comparative analysis involves comparing two or more languages to determine their similarities and differences. It can help identify patterns and relationships between languages and provide insights into their histories.
Philosophical etymology: This type of constructed language is based on philosophical or logical principles, with words and grammar designed to reflect these principles.
A Priori etymology: In an A Priori language, all words are constructed from scratch, without any base in existing natural languages.
A Posteriori etymology: In an A Posteriori language, creators use features from existing natural languages to form the base of the new language.
Logographic etymology: This type of constructed language is based on a system of symbols rather than individual words. Each symbol represents a concept, allowing for more efficient communication.
Phonetic etymology: Phonetic languages focus on the sounds of words, with each character representing a specific sound rather than a complete word.
Polyglot etymology: Polyglot languages combine elements from multiple existing languages to create unique constructs.
Engineered etymology: This type of language takes existing language constructs and rearranges them to fit a more efficient or logical system.
Isolating etymology: Isolating languages use few, if any, affixes or conjugations, instead relying on sentence order and context to convey meaning.
Agglutinative etymology: Agglutinative languages utilize a large quantity of affixes and conjugations to create new forms of words.
Fusional etymology: Fusional languages merge verb tense, case, and mood into single affixes, creating highly compact sentences.
Synthetic etymology: Synthetic languages are highly inflected and have complex grammar and syntax structures.
Analytic etymology: Analytic languages rely on individual words and simple grammar structures to convey meaning.
Creole etymology: Creole languages develop through the combination of multiple languages, often with a simplified grammar and vocabulary.
Revived etymology: Revived languages are constructed based on historical languages that are no longer spoken, with creators using available resources to piece together the language's grammar and vocabulary.
Artistic etymology: Artistic languages are constructed based purely on aesthetic principles, rather than practicality or communication needs.
"It is a subfield of historical linguistics, philology and semiotics."
"It draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics."
"To construct a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings that a morpheme, phoneme, word, or sign has carried across time."
"For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts, and texts about the language, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods."
"How they developed in meaning and form, or when and how they entered the language."
"Etymologists apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about forms that are too old for any direct information to be available."
"By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary."
"Word roots in many European languages, for example, can be traced all the way back to the origin of the Indo-European language family."
"Current etymological research is done on language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian." Note: Since the provided paragraph does not contain twenty distinct questions, I have provided answers to all possible topics covered in the paragraph.