Editing Historical linguistics (section)

== Etymology ==
[[Etymology]] studies the history of [[word]]s: when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. Words may enter a language in several ways, including being borrowed as [[loanword]]s from another language, being derived by combining pre-existing elements in the language, by a hybrid known as [[phono-semantic matching]].

In languages with a long and detailed history, etymology makes use of [[philology]], the study of how words change from culture to culture over time. Etymologists also apply the methods of [[comparative linguistics]] to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information (such as writing) to be known. By analysis of related languages by the [[comparative method]], linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In that way, [[root (linguistics)|word roots]] that can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the [[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] [[language family]] have been found. Although originating in the philological tradition, much current etymological research is done in [[language family|language families]] for which little or no early documentation is available, such as [[Uralic languages|Uralic]] and [[Austronesian languages|Austronesian]].