Word Origins by John Ayto is a comprehensive guide to understanding the structure, origin, and history of the English language. Through the exploration of hundreds of key words, Ayto examines how words and expressions evolve over time.
Key Learnings:
⢠English is a constantly evolving language, borrowing words and expressions from a variety of sources over time.
⢠Changes in a language, including the words and expression used can be better understood by understanding the roots, structure and history of the language over time.
⢠Different words can mean different things in different contexts.
For a UX Designer, this book is a recommended read as it helps to understand the nuances of the language; which in turn can give deeper insights into user behavior and product design.
Additional books of interest for UX Designers include âDonât Make Me Thinkâ by Steve Krug, âThe Design of Everyday Thingsâ by Don Norman, and âDesign for Emotionâ by Aaron Walter.
âď¸Â Highlights
The purpose of this book is to uncover the often surprising connections between elements of the English lexicon that have become obscured by centuries of language change â the links in our word-web that join such unlikely partners as, for instance, beef and cow, bacteria and imbecile, and bishop and spy.
Since then it has split up into a large number of subgroups, which today provide nearly all the languages of Europe and have also spread over large areas of the Middle East and northern India. Among them are the Indo-Iranian languages, including Hindi and ancient Sanskrit; the Slavic languages â Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croat, and so on; the Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian (which of all these modern languages most closely resembles its Indo-European ancestor); the Celtic languages, such as Welsh, Gaelic, and Breton; and Greek.
in the history of English, there are two particular groups that are of central importance. The first is the Romance languages: classical Latin, the literary language of ancient Rome; and French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, which evolved from Vulgar Latin, the language of the common people that spread through the Western Roman Empire.
second important group, of course, is the Germanic languages: for that is the group to which English itself belongs. The existence of the Germanic peoples as a separate speech community dates back at least 3,000 years. Their first northern European home has been traced to an area around the river Elbe. At this time they all spoke the same language, which is generally known as Common Germanic
The only East Germanic language of which any written evidence survives is Gothic. Now extinct, it was spoken by Germanic peoples who migrated back eastwards to the area of modern Bulgaria and the Crimea.
North Germanic, which has evolved into modern Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. And lastly there was West Germanic, the ancestor of modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English.
the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. They spoke a mutually intelligible set of Germanic dialects (whose closest modern continental relative is Frisian), which formed the basis of what is now known as Old English (the alternative term âAnglo-Saxonâ is no longer much used). This was a more or less homogeneous language, but with marked geographical differences reflecting the areas into which the various Germanic peoples had moved: the Angles into the Midlands (where Mercian was spoken) and the North (whose form of Old English is now called Northumbrian);
It was Latin itself, together with Greek, that formed the next wave of lexical innovation in English. With the Renaissance came a revival in classical scholarship, and in the 16th and 17th centuries hundreds of Latin and Greek words were naturalized into English â among them apparatus, area, crisis, maximum, poem, and pollen,
There is not a major language in the world that has not over the past 500 years made some contribution to English,
Italian (aria, arcade, bandit, bust, escort, frigate, granite, madrigal, pedal, solo, umbrella, etc) and Hindi (bungalow, chintz, cot, juggernaut, pundit,
Italian (aria, arcade, bandit, bust, escort, frigate, granite, madrigal, pedal, solo, umbrella, etc) and Hindi (bungalow, chintz, cot, juggernaut, pundit, shampoo, etc) to the more modest gifts from the likes of Finnish (sauna) and Tibetan (lama).
formation of blends (conflations of existing words, such as motel formed from motor and hotel) and acronyms (words made up from initial letters, like yuppie â a young urban professional) is characteristic of late 20th-century English.
The Latin word gradus âstepâ, for instance, lies behind an enormous range of English vocabulary, much of it formed by prefixation: aggression, for example, congress, degrade, degree, digress, egress, ingredient, ingress, progress, regress, retrograde, and transgress, not to mention grade, gradation, gradient, gradual, and graduate.
Latin âgo, go away, give upâ, which has given English accede, ancestor, cease, cede, concede, exceed, intercede, precede, proceed, recede, and succeed, plus a range of related nouns such as concession and procession.
The purpose of this book is to uncover the often surprising connections between elements of the English lexicon that have become obscured by centuries of language change â the links in our word-web that join such unlikely partners as, for instance, beef and cow, bacteria and imbecile, and bishop and spy.
Since then it has split up into a large number of subgroups, which today provide nearly all the languages of Europe and have also spread over large areas of the Middle East and northern India. Among them are the Indo-Iranian languages, including Hindi and ancient Sanskrit; the Slavic languages â Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croat, and so on; the Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian (which of all these modern languages most closely resembles its Indo-European ancestor); the Celtic languages, such as Welsh, Gaelic, and Breton; and Greek.
in the history of English, there are two particular groups that are of central importance. The first is the Romance languages: classical Latin, the literary language of ancient Rome; and French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, which evolved from Vulgar Latin, the language of the common people that spread through the Western Roman Empire.
second important group, of course, is the Germanic languages: for that is the group to which English itself belongs. The existence of the Germanic peoples as a separate speech community dates back at least 3,000 years. Their first northern European home has been traced to an area around the river Elbe. At this time they all spoke the same language, which is generally known as Common Germanic
The only East Germanic language of which any written evidence survives is Gothic. Now extinct, it was spoken by Germanic peoples who migrated back eastwards to the area of modern Bulgaria and the Crimea.
North Germanic, which has evolved into modern Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. And lastly there was West Germanic, the ancestor of modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English.
the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. They spoke a mutually intelligible set of Germanic dialects (whose closest modern continental relative is Frisian), which formed the basis of what is now known as Old English (the alternative term âAnglo-Saxonâ is no longer much used). This was a more or less homogeneous language, but with marked geographical differences reflecting the areas into which the various Germanic peoples had moved: the Angles into the Midlands (where Mercian was spoken) and the North (whose form of Old English is now called Northumbrian);
It was Latin itself, together with Greek, that formed the next wave of lexical innovation in English. With the Renaissance came a revival in classical scholarship, and in the 16th and 17th centuries hundreds of Latin and Greek words were naturalized into English â among them apparatus, area, crisis, maximum, poem, and pollen,
There is not a major language in the world that has not over the past 500 years made some contribution to English,
Italian (aria, arcade, bandit, bust, escort, frigate, granite, madrigal, pedal, solo, umbrella, etc) and Hindi (bungalow, chintz, cot, juggernaut, pundit,
Italian (aria, arcade, bandit, bust, escort, frigate, granite, madrigal, pedal, solo, umbrella, etc) and Hindi (bungalow, chintz, cot, juggernaut, pundit, shampoo, etc) to the more modest gifts from the likes of Finnish (sauna) and Tibetan (lama).
formation of blends (conflations of existing words, such as motel formed from motor and hotel) and acronyms (words made up from initial letters, like yuppie â a young urban professional) is characteristic of late 20th-century English.
The Latin word gradus âstepâ, for instance, lies behind an enormous range of English vocabulary, much of it formed by prefixation: aggression, for example, congress, degrade, degree, digress, egress, ingredient, ingress, progress, regress, retrograde, and transgress, not to mention grade, gradation, gradient, gradual, and graduate.
Latin âgo, go away, give upâ, which has given English accede, ancestor, cease, cede, concede, exceed, intercede, precede, proceed, recede, and succeed, plus a range of related nouns such as concession and procession.
