Etymology is the grammatical study of origin and history of words, where they came from and how they evolved over the years.
from the greek etumology, etymology is concerned with finding the calls great (words that originate others) of words. After all, every known word has a meaning and derivation from some other word, which may belong to another language or to a language that has already been extinct.
A great example is Latin, a language that has been in disuse for many years and is responsible for the formation of several words currently used in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, among others, which are called "languages Latinos".
However, it is not just from Latin that we build our vocabulary. Even today, countless terms we use in everyday life have their origins in foreign languages or cultures that no longer exist, such as Tupi Guarani. In the Portuguese spoken in Brazil, there are many expressions and words that have their great from the Tupi language, such as ipanema, copacabana, pineapple, cashew and countless others.
Those responsible for studying the origin and history of words are the etymologists, which try to explain the reasons why certain terms are written in a certain way, even if the pronunciation is different. Example: "House" ("s" with "z" sound) or "Apple" ("ç" with "s" sound).
There are also the false etymologies, usually attributed by common sense and popular culture to a word that is simply similar to another, but without evidence from an etymologist.
For example, the word lining, according to the false etymology, would have been derived from English go all ("for all", in Portuguese), however, etymologists say that the term is actually an abbreviation of the expression forrobobo, which has existed for a long time in Brazil.
Check out examples of the etymological origin of some words in the Portuguese language:
- Pineapple: from tupi iba-cati (fruit that smells a lot)
- Work: from latin tripled (be tortured)
- Heart: from latin color or cordis (heart)
- Citizenship: from latin civitas (City)
- Love: from latin love (the spelling and meaning remain the same as the original Latin)