The etymology of a word refers to its origin and historical development: that is, its earliest known use, its transmission form one language to another, and its changes in from and meaning.Etymology is also the term for the branch of linguistics that studies word histories.
ریشه شناسی یا علم اشتقاق، علم مطالعه تاریخی وازه ها و بررسی تحول شکل واژه ها می باشد.مسائلی مانند اینکه چه موقع وارد زبانی شده اند، از چه منبعی وارد شده اند و اینکه در طول زمان چه تغییری در ساختار و معنای آنها ایجاد شده است، در این حیطه بررسی می گردد.
What’s the Difference Between a Definition and Etymology?
A definition tells us what a word meens and how it’s used in our own time.
An etymology tells us where a word came from (often, but not always, from another language) and what is used to mean. For example, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language , the definition of the word disaster is “an occurrence causing widespread destruction and distress; a catastrophe” or “a grave misfortune.” But the etymology of the woed disaster takes us to a time when people commonly blamed great misfortunes on the influence of the stars.
Disaster first appeared in English in the late 16 th centry. Just in time for Shakespeare to use the word in the play King Lear. It arrived by way of the Old Italian word disastro, which meant “unfavorable to one’s stars.”
This older , astrological sense of disaster becomes easier to understand when we study its Latin root word, astrum, which also appears in our modern “star” word astronomy. With the negative Latin prefix dis- (“apart”) added to astrum (“star”). The word (in Latin, Old Italian, and Middle French) conveyed the idea that a catastrophe could be traced to the “evil influence of a star or planet” ( a definition that the dictionary tells us is now “obsolete”).
N,B (nota bene)
The origin of words are extremely complicated . You should use this list as a guide only , to help you understand possible meanings.
A prefix is placed at the beinning a word to modify or change its meaning.
پیشوند حروفی هستند که ابتدای کلمه می آیند و معنی کلمه را تغییر می دهند.
Prefixes and suffixes are grammatical and lingual “affixes.” Prefixed are affixed before and suffixes after a base word stem to add information.
For example , with the word “prehistoric,” the prefix is “pre” meaning “before”, the base word is “history” meaning “recorded events and knowledge”, and the suffix is “ic” meaning “relating to the science of”.
In other words, “prefix” simply refers to an attrachment before or in front of, in this case , a shorter word or stem.
A suffix is a group of letters placed at the end of a word to make a new word . A suffix can make a new word in one od two ways:
پسوند حروفی هستند که در انتهای کلمه ظاهر میشوند و آدات کلمه را تغییر می دهند. یعنی اسم ، صفت، فعل، قید و …
۱٫Inflectional (grammatical): for example, changing singular to plural (dog dogs), or changing present tense to past tense (walk -> walked). In this case, the basic meaning of the word does not change.
۲٫Derivational (the new word has a new meaning. “derived” from the original word): for example , teach -> teacher or care -> careful
Inflectional suffixes
پسوند صرفی
Inflectional suffixes do not change the meaning of the original word. So in “Every day I walk to school” and “Yesterday I walked to school”, the words walk and walked have the same basic meaning . In “I have one car” and “I have two cars” , the basic meaning of the words car and cars is exactly the same. In these case, the suffix is added for grammatical “correctness”.
Derivational suffixes
پسوند اشتقاقی
With derivational suffixes, the new word has a new meaning , and is usually a different part of speech. But the new meaning is related to the old meaning.
-it is “derived” from the old meaning.
We can add more than one suffix, as in this example:
Derive (verb) + ation -> derivation (noun) + al -> derivational (adjective)
There are several hundred derivational suffixes. Here are some of the more common ones.
