Etymology in the context of Pragmatics

The kithara (Greek: κιθάρα, romanized: kithára), Latinized as cithara, was an ancient Greek musical instrument in the yoke lutes family. It was a seven-stringed professional version of the lyre, which was regarded as a rustic, or folk instrument, appropriate for teaching music to beginners. As opposed to the simpler lyre, the cithara was primarily used by professional musicians, called kitharodes. In modern Greek, the word kithara has come to mean "guitar"; etymologically, the word guitar derives from kithara.

Doctrine (from Latin: doctrina, meaning 'teaching, instruction') is a codification of beliefs or a body of teachings or instructions, taught principles or positions, as the essence of teachings in a given branch of knowledge or in a belief system. The etymological Greek analogue is 'catechism'.

Often the word doctrine specifically suggests a body of religious principles as promulgated by a church. Doctrine may also refer to a principle of law, in the common-law traditions, established through a history of past decisions.

This is a list of roots, suffixes, and prefixes used in medical terminology, their meanings, and their etymologies. Most of them are combining forms in Neo-Latin and hence international scientific vocabulary. There are a few general rules about how they combine. First, prefixes and suffixes, most of which are derived from ancient Greek or classical Latin, have a droppable vowel, usually -o-. As a general rule, this vowel almost always acts as a joint-stem to connect two consonantal roots (e.g. arthr- + -o- + -logy = arthrology), but generally, the -o- is dropped when connecting to a vowel-stem (e.g. arthr- + -itis = arthritis, instead of arthr-o-itis). Second, medical roots generally go together according to language, i.e., Greek prefixes occur with Greek suffixes and Latin prefixes with Latin suffixes. Although international scientific vocabulary is not stringent about segregating combining forms of different languages, it is advisable when coining new words not to mix different lingual roots.

Choronym (from Greek: χώρα 'region' or 'country' and Greek: ὄνομα 'name') is a linguistic term that designates a proper name of an individual region or a country. The study of regional and country names is known as choronymy, or choronymics. Since choronyms are a subclass of toponyms, choronymic studies represent a distinctive subfield of toponymic studies and belong to the wider field of onomastic studies.

Choronymic studies are primarily focused on questions related to the origin (etymology) and meanings (semantics) of choronyms. Since names of regions and countries have great historical, cultural, political and social significance, the field of choronymic studies is closely related to sociolinguistic and ethnolinguistic studies.

The etymology of the name of Italy has been the subject of reconstructions by linguists and historians. Considerations extraneous to the specifically linguistic reconstruction of the name have formed a rich corpus of solutions that are either associated with legend (the existence of a king named Italus) or in any case strongly problematic (such as the connection of the name with the grape vine, vitis in Latin).

One theory is that the name derives from the word Italói, a term with which the ancient Greeks designated a tribe of Sicels who had crossed the Strait of Messina and who inhabited the extreme tip of the Italic Peninsula, near today's Catanzaro. This is attested by the fact that the ancient Greek peoples who colonized present-day Calabria, referred to themselves as Italiotes, that is, inhabitants of Italy. This group of Italian people had worshiped the simulacrum of a calf (vitulus, in Latin), and the name would therefore mean "inhabitants of the land of calves (young bulls)". In any case, it is known that in archaic times the name indicated the part located in the extreme south of the Italian Peninsula.

Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical linguistics involves several key areas of study, including the reconstruction of ancestral languages, the classification of languages into families, (comparative linguistics) and the analysis of the cultural and social influences on language development.

This field is grounded in the uniformitarian principle, which posits that the processes of language change observed today were also at work in the past, unless there is clear evidence to suggest otherwise. Historical linguists aim to describe and explain changes in individual languages, explore the history of speech communities, and study the origins and meanings of words (etymology).

Pyrotechnics is the science and craft of creating fireworks, but also includes safety matches, oxygen candles, explosive bolts (and other fasteners), parts of automotive airbags, as well as gas-pressure blasting in mining, quarrying, and demolition. This trade relies upon self-contained and self-sustained exothermic chemical reactions to make heat, light, gas, smoke and/or sound. The name comes from the Greek words pyr (πυρ; 'fire') and technikós (τεχνικός; 'artistic').

Improper use of pyrotechnics could lead to pyrotechnic accidents. People responsible for the safe storage, handling, and functioning of pyrotechnic devices are known as pyrotechnicians.

In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language.

Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate. It can also happen that words which appear similar, or identical, in different languages, are not cognate.

Germania (/dʒərˈmeɪni.ə/ jər-MAY-nee-ə; Latin: [ɡɛrˈmaːni.a]), also more specifically called Magna Germania (English: Greater Germania), Germania Libera (English: Free Germania), or Germanic Barbaricum to distinguish it from the Roman provinces of Germania Inferior and Germania Superior, was a historical region in north-central Europe during the Roman era, which was associated by Roman authors with the Germanic peoples. According to Roman geographers, this region stretched roughly from the Rhine in the west to the Vistula in the east, and to the Upper Danube in the south, and the known parts of southern Scandinavia in the north. Archaeologically, these people correspond roughly to the Roman Iron Age of those regions.

The Latin name Germania means "land of the Germani", but the etymology of the name Germani itself is uncertain. During the Gallic Wars of the 1st century BC, the Roman general Julius Caesar encountered Germani originating from beyond the Rhine. He referred to their lands beyond the Rhine as "Germania". West of the Rhine, the prosperous Roman provinces of Germania Superior and Germania Inferior, sometimes collectively referred to as "Roman Germania", were established in northeast Roman Gaul, while territories east of the Rhine remained independent of Roman control. The Roman emperors also sought to expand east of the Rhine to the Elbe, but these efforts were hampered by the victory of Arminius at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

In philosophy, genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by attempting to account for the scope, breadth, or totality of discourse, thus extending the possibility of analysis. Moreover, a genealogy often attempts to look beyond the discourse in question toward the conditions of their possibility (particularly in Michel Foucault's genealogies). It has been developed as a continuation of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Genealogy is opposed to the Marxist use of ideology to explain the totality of historical discourse within the time period in question by focusing on a singular or dominant discourse (ideology).

For example, tracking the lineages of a concept such as 'globalization' can be called a 'genealogy' to the extent that the concept is located in its changing constitutive setting. This entails not just documenting its changing meaning (etymology) but the social basis of its changing meaning.

Philology (from Ancient Greek φιλολογία (philología) 'love of word') is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of literary texts and oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. In older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative and historical linguistics.

Classical philology studies classical languages. Classical philology principally originated from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the fourth century BC, and was continued by the Ancient Greeks and then the Romans throughout the Roman and Byzantine Empire. It was eventually resumed by European scholars of the Renaissance, where it was soon joined by philologies of other European (Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, etc.), Asian (Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, etc.), and African (Egyptian, etc.) languages. Indo-European studies involve the comparative philology of all Indo-European languages.

Wiktionary (US: /ˈwɪkʃənɛri/ WIK-shə-nerr-ee, UK: /ˈwɪkʃənəri/ WIK-shə-nər-ee; rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in a large number of natural languages and a number of artificial languages. These entries may contain definitions, images for illustration, pronunciations, etymologies, inflections, usage examples, quotations, related terms, and translations of terms into other languages, among other features. It is collaboratively edited by volunteers via a wiki. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and dictionary. It is available in 198 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software, MediaWiki, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries.

Because Wiktionary is not limited by print space considerations, most of Wiktionary's language editions provide definitions and translations of terms from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found in thesauri.

A digraph (from Ancient Greek δίς (dís) 'double' and γράφω (gráphō) 'to write') or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.

Some digraphs represent phonemes that cannot be represented with a single character in the writing system of a language, like ⟨ch⟩ in Spanish chico and ocho. Other digraphs represent phonemes that can also be represented by single characters. A digraph that shares its pronunciation with a single character may be a relic from an earlier period of the language when the digraph had a different pronunciation, or may represent a distinction that is made only in certain dialects, like the English ⟨wh⟩. Some such digraphs are used for purely etymological reasons, like ⟨ph⟩ in French.

Etymologiae (Latin for 'Etymologies'), also known as the Origines ('Origins'), usually abbreviated Orig., is an etymological encyclopedia compiled by the influential Christian bishop Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) towards the end of his life. Isidore was encouraged to write the book by his friend Braulio, Bishop of Saragossa. Etymologiae summarized and organized a wealth of knowledge from hundreds of classical sources; three of its books are derived largely from Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Isidore acknowledges Pliny, but not his other principal sources, namely Cassiodorus, Servius, and Gaius Julius Solinus.

Etymologiae covers an encyclopedic range of topics. Etymology, the origins of words, is prominent, but the work also covers, among other things, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, geometry, music, astronomy, medicine, law, the church and heretical sects, pagan philosophers, languages, cities, humans, animals, the physical world, geography, public buildings, roads, metals, rocks, agriculture, war, ships, clothes, food, and tools.

On a residential area, a front yard (United States, Canada, Australia) or front garden (United Kingdom, Europe) is the portion of land between the street and the front of the house. If it is covered in grass, it may be referred to as a front lawn. The area behind the house, usually more private, is the back yard or back garden. Yard and garden share an etymology and have overlapping meanings.

In North America, front yards, which normally include considerable driveway and parking space, tend to be mostly lawn even when large, but in Europe they are often treated as a flower garden and may be heavily planted. In North American suburbia, there may be no physical barriers marking the front and sides of the plot, which would be very unusual in Europe, where there are generally walls, fences or hedges on three sides of the garden.

Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the lexicon of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own, and is made up of small components called morphemes. Lexicology examines every feature of a word – including formation, spelling, origin, usage, and definition.

Lexicology also considers the relationships that exist between words. In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is composed of lexemes, which are abstract units of meaning that correspond to a set of related forms of a word. Lexicology looks at how words can be broken down as well as identifies common patterns they follow.