On the Particular Joys of Etymological Detective Work

On the Particular Joys of Etymological Detective Work - 3 Quarks Daily

Martha Barnette at LitHub: But just how do scholars dig up those linguistic fossils and discover those brilliant pictures within? One way is to compare related words in languages arising from a common ancestor, which brings us to the hypothetical mother tongue scholars call Proto-Indo-European. The languages spoken by nearly half of the world’s population—including some four hundred million native speakers of English—are thought to have descende…

On the Particular Joys of Etymological Detective Work

I’m often asked which word is my favorite, but that’s like being asked to choose a favorite star in the sky. There are way too many, whether in English or other languages. If pressed, I usually say my favorite is mellifluous, which describes something “sweetly pleasing”—the sound of a flute, a supple writing style, a […]