Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An earlier form of a word in the same language or in an ancestor language. For example, Indo-European *duwo and Old English twā are etymons of Modern English two.
- noun A word or morpheme from which compounds and derivatives are formed.
- noun A foreign word from which a particular loan word is derived. For example, Latin duo, “two,” is an etymon of English duodecimal.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The original element of a word; the root or primitive.
- noun The original or fundamental sense; the primary or root meaning.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun An original form; primitive word; root.
- noun rare Original or fundamental signification.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A source word of a given word.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a simple form inferred as the common basis from which related words in several languages can be derived by linguistic processes
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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But then, instead of calling the etymon "Hindi-Urdu cakor" or "Hindustani cakor," they invented a completely spurious distinction between what look to the untutored eye like two different preforms, apparently because their transcription system for Hindi uses c for the unaspirated \ch\ (presumably using ch for the aspirated consonant), whereas the one for Urdu uses ch for the same phoneme (and presumably chh for the aspirated one).
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I think maybe the key here is that while people will go in with degree's in relevant stubjects, others, such as etymon maybe, will go in with just the poor and simple smarts!!
New Media Medicine etymon 2010
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Notice, reader, how Proto-Japanese *mi 'three' is claimed to come from *ñi and that the attachment of *[ñ] to the Proto-Manchu-Tungus etymon is unexplained and ad hoc, together with the fact that a change of [ɲ] to [m] neighbouring a front high vowel is absurd and completely unmotivated from the perspective of rational notions of phonology.
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This Minoan etymon is my attempt at better explaining (via expected Etruscan *caupaθ) the source of both Germanic *haubida- and Latin caput in a way that an over-cited Indo-European root (*)*kaput- just can't convincingly accomplish without fiddling with the phonetics.
Archive 2010-07-01 2010
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This has got me thinking hard and long because while there appears to be a relationship between the above words, finding a common etymon behind them all is tricky.
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The blogauthor of Bradshaw of the Future noted that the American Heritage Dictionary combined 'to die' and 'to rub away' into a single etymon, something that makes perfect sense to me because it would suggest that 'to wear away' is the original sense from which 'to die' is to be derived through metaphor.
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This Minoan etymon is my attempt at better explaining (via expected Etruscan *caupaθ) the source of both Germanic *haubida- and Latin caput in a way that an over-cited Indo-European root (*)*kaput- just can't convincingly accomplish without fiddling with the phonetics.
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In fact, I'm starting to get the strong notion that the real reason why some Indoeuropeanists like Julius Pokorny had included Sanskrit kapr̥t- 'penis' into his cognate series under the 'goat' etymon was just to make it look less like a substratal loanword restricted to Western Europe and more like a fully attested IE root in order to fill out his 1959 book Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch.
Archive 2010-09-01 2010
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In fact, I'm starting to get the strong notion that the real reason why some Indoeuropeanists like Julius Pokorny had included Sanskrit kapr̥t- 'penis' into his cognate series under the 'goat' etymon was just to make it look less like a substratal loanword restricted to Western Europe and more like a fully attested IE root in order to fill out his 1959 book Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch.
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However, if we follow instead Hesychius' testimony, the irregular Celtic reflexes can be perfectly explained through borrowing from the implied Etruscan etymon *capra with its unaspirated k-.
Manly goats 2010
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