Scientific etymology, as opposed to the naive or the purely impressionistic, finds its strongest support in historical linguistics, and, in turn, within this discipline, in its consecratory discovery of the regularity of sound change. By virtue of this attribute, the researcher, in this case the etymologist, is capable of finding the etymology of a given term of which he wasn’t yet sure. Furthermore, by taking into account the regularity of the change, he can predict it, even in absence of available corroborating corpus at hand. Empirical confirmation for an etymological prospect can be found either with the discovery of novel dialect forms not previously known, or by virtue of unsuspected evidence provided by philologically interpreted written record. The present work aims to demonstrate the importance of written source, printed or manuscript, as a rich and inexhaustible vein of infor...

Scientific etymology, as opposed to the naive or the purely impressionistic, finds its strongest support in historical linguistics, and, in turn, within this discipline, in its consecratory discovery of the regularity of sound change. By virtue of this attribute, the researcher, in this case the etymologist, is capable of finding the etymology of a given term of which he wasn’t yet sure. Furthermore, by taking into account the regularity of the change, he can predict it, even in absence of available corroborating corpus at hand. Empirical confirmation for an etymological prospect can be found either with the discovery of novel dialect forms not previously known, or by virtue of unsuspected evidence provided by philologically interpreted written record. The present work aims to demonstrate the importance of written source, printed or manuscript, as a rich and inexhaustible vein of infor...

Scientific etymology, as opposed to the naive or the purely impressionistic, finds its strongest support in historical linguistics, and, in turn, within this discipline, in its consecratory discovery of the regularity of sound change. By virtue of this attribute, the researcher, in this case the etymologist, is capable of finding the etymology of a given term of which he wasn’t yet sure. Furthermore, by taking into account the regularity of the change, he can predict it, even in absence of available corroborating corpus at hand. Empirical confirmation for an etymological prospect can be found either with the discovery of novel dialect forms not previously known, or by virtue of unsuspected evidence provided by philologically interpreted written record. The present work aims to demonstrate the importance of written source, printed or manuscript, as a rich and inexhaustible vein of infor...