Comparative Etymological Study of “Society”, “People”, “Nation” in Persian and English

Abstract

Etymology is diachronic study of words origin in which words changes can be traced. It illustrates change process in any aspects of a word, such as phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. Linguists reconstruct proto-languages with following changes occurred in languages, and in this way so many other things in the history become clear. What is focused in the present paper as the first step of data analysis is an etymological study of three words – society, nation, people – in English, and their equivalents in Persian. In the second step, a comparative study is done to see if the change processes are the same in the mentioned languages. And at last a sociolinguistic conclusion is presented.