Category: Basics

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 words are cognates.

Toponyms and geography are also closely interlinked. In many cases, place-names can be seen to be the spoken expression of Man’s view of the surrounding landscape.

The lexicon of Ancient Greek contains hundreds of foreign words. These words can be recognized, because they do not correspond with the Greek outcomes of Indo-European phonology and corresponding sound laws. Moreover, the semantics of many Greek words are obviously not Indo-European, since their concepts were absent in this language of nomadic pastoralists from the…

There is a compelling “lexical similarity” between Semitic and Indo-European languages. These two families, share many cognate words. Some of these words underwent phonetic changes, and became: “camouflaged cognates”, while others are still “explicit cognates”. a Cognate is a word which is historically derived from the same source as another word. For example: The Arabic…

“Swadesh list” is a compilation of basic vocabulary items used in historical linguistics to compare languages and their relatedness.This list was originally compiled to focus on the core vocabulary, the items most likely to persist in a language over the millennia.Swadesh collection of words was also intended to avoid borrowing, based on the idea that…

Toponymy has traditionally been understood as a part of linguistics, but historians and archaeologists have been interested in it, as well.

Many toponyms are composed of ‘SPECIFIC’ and ‘GENERIC’ elements (or forms).

There are identifiable processes which occur over time to place names, and which alter the place names in such a way that their original meanings are lost.

A common question about toponyms concerns their origin. We can identify at least five common sources for toponyms.

Toponyms as more than mere labels, they represent a narrative of survival and community formation in a landscape marked by socio-economic challenges.