Etymology
Etymology is the inspect of the history of a form of words and, by extension, the origin as well as evolution of their semantic meaning across time. this is the a subfield of historical linguistics, as alive as draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, semiotics, together with phonetics.
For languages with a long written history, etymologists make usage of texts, and texts about the language, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in meaning and form, or when and how they entered the language. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information approximately forms that are too old for any direct information to be available. By analyzing related languages with a technique so-called as the comparative method, linguists can make-up inferences about their dual-lane parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots in European languages, for example, can be traced all the way back to the origin of the Indo-European language family.
Even though etymological research originated from the philological tradition, much current etymological research is done on language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian.