Linguistics loves to use examples from all languages! If you look at a text book on the subject, you'll learn about the existence of many languages, some with fewer speakers than the number of people in your class.
i gotta be honest, back in the day I have to read through books : a journey with words and boring pages, to be able to have a certain amount of understanding of semantic and its branches. This video gives me a lot of hope, joys, and happiness for how fun it is for people out there to obtain this kind of knowledge nowdays. Thank you so much Crash Course for your works. I adore it so much.
1:05 Don't forget contronym: one word with two or more contradictory/opposite meanings. I.e the verb "dust". As in "I dust the house", which means to remove particles from the house and "I dust for fingerprints" to add particles to see fingerprints.
If you look, you can find lots more examples. Like, "The alarm went off" could mean either that the alarm started or that it ended. People understand contronyms to mean contradictory things in different contexts. I think, in your example, people implicitly feel that dusting a house has a narrow meaning - it means removing the dust. So we aren't just using the same sense of a word different way. We're using a contradictory sense of the word.
@@0ValdeCalebros Hmm, I've typically heard the term in the context of specifically removing or adding, but you may be right that that's an additional definition for the term. Either way, the point is a contronym is another aspect to semantics to consider. Perhaps a clearer example of one is the word "sanction" which could mean to give approval for an action/thing or to punish/put restrictions on some person or nation for illicit activity. Another example would be the word "apology". In the context of an apologist, it means a justification for an action, but it could also mean expressing wrong-doing and/or remorse of an action. Edit: Funnily enough, we all assume when someone says "I apologize for my actions" that they recognize wrong-doing, but if they're playing on semantics, they may mean they think they were justified in their action. Oh, and here's an example of a word that would have recently become a contronym: "Literally". I'm sure you see/hear people using that all the time, for example "I literally died from laughter". Well, in that instance, literally actually means figuratively, otherwise they wouldn't be talking to you and they would be dead lol.
Taboos and euphemisms can go so far that they erase a word from usage. 'Bear', in almost every European language, means 'brown thing'; they have determined that this is a euphemism to avoid saying the animal's real name and avoid its wrath. It worked so well that that real name is no longer known.
I wouldn't sah the original term is no longer known. It's generally agreed upon that the proto-germanic word "bear" replaced was a cognate with the term that gave us Latin "Ursus" and, eventually, Spanish "Oso". We can't know what the term exactly was, or how exactly it would have evolved, but we're not in the dark either.
It's something like *urktos in PIE. The southern and eastern Indo-European languages tended to keep the word, while the northern and western ones tended to use taboo replacement via "brown one".
"How do we know what words mean?" - "Look it up in the dictionary!" is the linguistics version of "Where does electricity come from?" - "The wall socket."
In Philippine English or the English dialect used in the Philippines by Filipinos, a toilet, toilet room, bathroom, or a wash room, is called a "comfort room" or abbreviated as a "C.R." or "CR". It's maybe because we Filipinos find this particular place as a place where you can be comfortable or where you can feel comfort, but I just don't know the exact reason why and its specific origin and history.
This is shaping up to be a great CrashCourse. I would love it if an episode was devoted to how new languages are created. I love the theory -- from Hawaii -- that it's bored children who create new languages.
The Norwegian matpakke is just a sandwich wrapped in paper that you usually bring either to school/work or maybe on a mountain hike. The word consists of two words. Mat(food) + pakke (package). The filling can be whatever you like.
I used to collect reference books. I was surprised to discover that the word computer was listed in a 1921 unabridged English dictionary. I was amused to read that it described someone's job, adding up columns of numbers and/or doing other mathematics or computations.
But everyone is on a different page. If you are not familiar with British English and American English. You can be lost in the sauce. When I was learning English, I believe that English is the same all over the world but then I was exposed to a British, and I realized that it all comes down to semantics. Location and experience mold the language and understanding we use. The same goes for all languages. Remember Spanish is not alike in every country that speaks it. There will be a 10-20% mutation. Heck, it is not the same American English spoken in every place in the US either.
Love this series. And others who love it would also probably love the podcast A Way With Words. Wish you could invite them on board, Taylor. That would be a cool interview session!
Awesome video again! Semantics courses at my university were infamously obtuse and formal--we had to learn set theory before even talking about types of meaning--and this was WAY easier to understand. It is hard to capture the scope of Semantics though.
It was a very good episode, as the previous ones. There is one important point to highlight though, namely that the two different meanings of 'bank' are an instance of homophony, not polysemy. Other than that, it was great!
Thanks for this. Now I know where to start in resolving some common arguments that come up for me. I think the issue is with interpretations related to predicate calculus.
If I don't know a word, I look it up but I also find sentences using that word and form my own sentences using that word. Practice and using the new words in your writing and speech helps move that word from your short term to your long term memory.
most linguists would agree that BANK is not an example of polysemy but of homonymy, in fact BANK is the most commonly used textbook example of homonymy
When I heard that hotdog might be a sandwich a cool podcast called 'A Hotdog Is A Sandwich' came to my mind. I recently discovered it and it's just amazing
My education borrowed the psychological term Schema. Packets of cultural information that attach themselves to phonemes which add meaning beyond their definition when formed into a word. Schema can also be entirely individual. What do you think of when you think of "A Fast Car" In America it's usually a red sports car, but it breaks down depending on the individual, and country of origin.
If bread is on both sides of a thing, it's a sandwich. If bread is flat underneath a thing, it's a pizza. If bread is folded to hold a thing, it's a taco. If bread is wrapped to contain a thing, it's a burrito. If it's a hot pocket, it isn't food, stop trying to call it food. ;)
Aww, I was hoping we'd segue into talking about scoping quantifiers over others! Ah well, the logician in me can always go do some lambda calculus to pass the time. Great video!
The Polish example is cloooooose but not 100%. wiedzieć is used for intransitive sentences with one exception, being wiem to, i know that (the fact thing) znać is used for transitive sentences. not just people, but answers, words, etc.
I feel like the AE definition is muddied a lot by advertisement... Best example is the "ice cream sandwich" - it was obviously called that because of its look _akin_ to a sandwich and to make it stand out from other cookie-and-cream ice products. But just because it sells well, doesn't mean it's actually a sandwich, right? If that was an argument, we'd also have to include small gelatenous sweet treats in the definition of "bear"...
not every speaker of every language or even is the same, though, or uses words in the same way - that's why there's sociolects and even idiolects! hoping this will get touched on in an episode on the sociocultural side + subfield of linguistics :)
@@ericBorja520 I personally drew the line when the definition started including fillings between rolls. Depending on where you are in England you call that a cob, a bap, a barm or a teacake, and I'm possibly forgetting a number of variations. I might be contradicted because that's dialect for you
seeing people in the comments talking about the Sandwich Debate, and even the Soup/Cereal convo, but the real question is: Is butt leg? (imo it totally is) also i miss my semantics homework from my undergrad days. predicate calculus was fun, easy*, and impressed my non-ling friends bc they thought i was doing some super complicated math with all the funky symbols we were using by the end of that quarter. *(for me, at the level we were at)
*Matpakke* means “packed lunch”. If you pack a burrito, then that's your matpakke. You could pack a bowl of salad, and it would still be a matpakke. A person from Norway might usually pack a very simple sandwich with liver pate and multiple pieces of bread, but she could also bring lompe or lefse (flat bread) and it would still be a matpakke.
Hold on! I am Norwegian and I've lived and visited places across the country. Vegimite is NOT a thing that is normal on "matpakka" (which means food package for anyone who wants to know). Just saying matpakka doesn't even have to contain bread it can be a salat if you want. But vegimite isn't a thing you can find outside of the biggest cities in Norway.
9:00 As o formal (as in used to be, not fancily dressed) i need to dissagree with theese associated meanings. All CC hosts like a rabbit means, that every particular CC host likes some (at least one) rabbit. Some can like more, some can like only one. Two or more can like the same rabbit (or several same rabits, while differ on others) or not, we dont know. But it deffinetelly does not mean that Every CC host each like a different rabbit - that would be much stronger condition. (Unless you would define your language that way, but we are not constructing a english now, are we?)
From Middle English gerle, girle, gyrle (“young person of any sex”), of uncertain origin. Probably from Old English gyrle, *gyrele, from Proto-Germanic *gurwilaz, a diminutive form of Proto-Germanic *gurwijaz (compare North Frisian gör (“girl”), Low German Gör, Göre (“child of either sex”), German Göre (“young child”), dialectal Norwegian gorre, dialectal Swedish garre, gurre (“small child”)), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰer- (“short”)[1] (compare Old Irish gair (“short”), Ancient Greek χρεώ (khreṓ, “need, necessity”), χρήσθαι (khrḗsthai, “to need”), Sanskrit ह्रस्व (hrasva, “short, small”)).
@@RusNad Fun fact: We still use "Göre" in german for children of either sex, but the meaning narrowed to "brat" (i.e. uneducated ill-bred kids) instead.
There's a really nice TED talk (th-cam.com/video/F6NU0DMjv0Y/w-d-xo.html) that goes into how dictionaries work and what makes a word "real". At the end of the day, what words and phrases mean comes down to how people use them in context, which is why you can get a phrase like "I could care less" to mean "I don't care", even though that is literally the one thing it rules out. Whatever works!
Fun fact: The German word "gift" means poison. Originally, it started out like well, gift in English. However, people assassinated each other by giving each other "gifts", and the meaning kind of stuck.
There are words that sound like what they are but (what are?): "the words that sound like what they are not-or something other than what they are or meant to mean"? Entomology and Etymology. Ento- sounds close enough to ants and by extension insects, fare enough mnemonic to give you a clue. But Ety- sounds like the personal pronoun of a Dugong, Manatee, or Loch Nessie's sister. Not the study of word hist/origins, nor the best example of what I was trying to convey. But anyway what are those words called? And then there is mnem: to remember, but what is the smallest definable/translatable word part or part that caries meaning/sound? It's my understanding that it's these subset comparisons is how word translation programs work.
I feel like Linguistics is such a deep topic and I'm soo glad there's now a Crash Course series about it. Thanks, you guys!
It's also always evolving, like language itself. So there's always enough to learn :D
I totally agree, which is why we'll need a second course after it
I've literally been waiting for years. Pretty stoked!
I'm disproportionately and unreasonably happy that this episode contained an example from Polish.
Linguistics loves to use examples from all languages! If you look at a text book on the subject, you'll learn about the existence of many languages, some with fewer speakers than the number of people in your class.
I wiem, right?:P
i gotta be honest, back in the day I have to read through books : a journey with words and boring pages, to be able to have a certain amount of understanding of semantic and its branches. This video gives me a lot of hope, joys, and happiness for how fun it is for people out there to obtain this kind of knowledge nowdays. Thank you so much Crash Course for your works. I adore it so much.
1:05 Don't forget contronym: one word with two or more contradictory/opposite meanings. I.e the verb "dust". As in "I dust the house", which means to remove particles from the house and "I dust for fingerprints" to add particles to see fingerprints.
@Markstache maybe this particular word isn’t a contronym, but a quick google search will introduce you to many words that are.
didn't both words get started because they used a similar tool?
the feathery stick for dusting the house and the fine brush for dusting prints?
If you look, you can find lots more examples. Like, "The alarm went off" could mean either that the alarm started or that it ended. People understand contronyms to mean contradictory things in different contexts. I think, in your example, people implicitly feel that dusting a house has a narrow meaning - it means removing the dust. So we aren't just using the same sense of a word different way. We're using a contradictory sense of the word.
@@0ValdeCalebros Hmm, I've typically heard the term in the context of specifically removing or adding, but you may be right that that's an additional definition for the term.
Either way, the point is a contronym is another aspect to semantics to consider. Perhaps a clearer example of one is the word "sanction" which could mean to give approval for an action/thing or to punish/put restrictions on some person or nation for illicit activity. Another example would be the word "apology". In the context of an apologist, it means a justification for an action, but it could also mean expressing wrong-doing and/or remorse of an action.
Edit:
Funnily enough, we all assume when someone says "I apologize for my actions" that they recognize wrong-doing, but if they're playing on semantics, they may mean they think they were justified in their action.
Oh, and here's an example of a word that would have recently become a contronym: "Literally". I'm sure you see/hear people using that all the time, for example "I literally died from laughter". Well, in that instance, literally actually means figuratively, otherwise they wouldn't be talking to you and they would be dead lol.
“I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.”
― Jane Wagner
😂 so true
Even CrashCourse is getting in on the "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" debate.
It's not because the two pieces are connected. That's not a discussion!
😂😂😂
It isn't!
Semantics 😂
A hot dog has starch on three sides; thus, it is a taco.
Taboos and euphemisms can go so far that they erase a word from usage. 'Bear', in almost every European language, means 'brown thing'; they have determined that this is a euphemism to avoid saying the animal's real name and avoid its wrath. It worked so well that that real name is no longer known.
I wouldn't sah the original term is no longer known. It's generally agreed upon that the proto-germanic word "bear" replaced was a cognate with the term that gave us Latin "Ursus" and, eventually, Spanish "Oso". We can't know what the term exactly was, or how exactly it would have evolved, but we're not in the dark either.
Source?
It's something like *urktos in PIE. The southern and eastern Indo-European languages tended to keep the word, while the northern and western ones tended to use taboo replacement via "brown one".
It's actually still known but just isn't used. There are still versions of the old word in old versions of English, Norse and Slavic
ursus and arktos meant brown?
These videos are making me so excited to learn more about Linguistics.
"How do we know what words mean?" - "Look it up in the dictionary!"
is the linguistics version of
"Where does electricity come from?" - "The wall socket."
In Philippine English or the English dialect used in the Philippines by Filipinos, a toilet, toilet room, bathroom, or a wash room, is called a "comfort room" or abbreviated as a "C.R." or "CR". It's maybe because we Filipinos find this particular place as a place where you can be comfortable or where you can feel comfort, but I just don't know the exact reason why and its specific origin and history.
“Arguing semantics“ is one of my new favorite phrases, right up there with “waxing poetic”.
Presentation, editing, and content are stellar. Keep up the good work :)
Semantics is one of my favorite branches of linguistics, along with phonology and historical linguistics.
I'm so happy this series exists! ☺
This is shaping up to be a great CrashCourse. I would love it if an episode was devoted to how new languages are created. I love the theory -- from Hawaii -- that it's bored children who create new languages.
Super good presentor.. her english is like.. super clear.
The Norwegian matpakke is just a sandwich wrapped in paper that you usually bring either to school/work or maybe on a mountain hike. The word consists of two words. Mat(food) + pakke (package). The filling can be whatever you like.
I used to collect reference books. I was surprised to discover that the word computer was listed in a 1921 unabridged English dictionary. I was amused to read that it described someone's job, adding up columns of numbers and/or doing other mathematics or computations.
I love CrashCourse videos! Every school should have them!
Semantics is everything, or else everyone would be on a different page
But everyone is on a different page. If you are not familiar with British English and American English. You can be lost in the sauce. When I was learning English, I believe that English is the same all over the world but then I was exposed to a British, and I realized that it all comes down to semantics. Location and experience mold the language and understanding we use. The same goes for all languages. Remember Spanish is not alike in every country that speaks it. There will be a 10-20% mutation. Heck, it is not the same American English spoken in every place in the US either.
Extremely interesting!
this series continues to make my Fridays better TT
Love this series. And others who love it would also probably love the podcast A Way With Words. Wish you could invite them on board, Taylor. That would be a cool interview session!
Awesome video again! Semantics courses at my university were infamously obtuse and formal--we had to learn set theory before even talking about types of meaning--and this was WAY easier to understand. It is hard to capture the scope of Semantics though.
A wonderful video
I hope that "What is the meaning of chair?" becomes a meme in the Crash Course community
As a Portuguese native speaker allow me to say that your pronunciation was pretty good! Loving the series, hope to see more soon
It was a very good episode, as the previous ones. There is one important point to highlight though, namely that the two different meanings of 'bank' are an instance of homophony, not polysemy. Other than that, it was great!
I love how I can always tell the next topic! YAS ME! YAS CRASHCOURSE!
Thanks for this. Now I know where to start in resolving some common arguments that come up for me. I think the issue is with interpretations related to predicate calculus.
Well done!
Semantically speaking, that is.
Love your videos! thank you so much for your work:)
I 👏🏾 am 👏🏾all 👏🏾for 👏🏾this 👏🏾episode 👏🏾let's 👏🏾get 👏🏾it!!!
If I don't know a word, I look it up but I also find sentences using that word and form my own sentences using that word. Practice and using the new words in your writing and speech helps move that word from your short term to your long term memory.
i’m the ultimate enabler of the “- is a sandwich/soup” argument. I wholeheartedly believe even our planet is a sandwich
Awesome video 👌
2:43 and 'silly' original meaning was "blessed"
And now I feel the urge to call toilet a "pooproom" :D
Craphouse FTW
most linguists would agree that BANK is not an example of polysemy but of homonymy, in fact BANK is the most commonly used textbook example of homonymy
Thank you so much for this!
I’m a French language teacher and I really appreciated this video.
There is a space missing between "words" and "They" at 7:22
I love Thought Cafe graphics
2:07
The word “you” is a good example as well.
Loving this...
When I heard that hotdog might be a sandwich a cool podcast called 'A Hotdog Is A Sandwich' came to my mind. I recently discovered it and it's just amazing
great video
THANK YOU!
My favorite part of the week!
Yo great episode as usual but can we petition Sarah green to host crash course art history and criticism pretty please
This video is just semantics.
_Get it?_
Awesome 👌
Nice example of a word whose meaning has changed over time!
predicate calculus is the reason i never took semantics beyond an introductory course... if i never see a lambda again in my life itll be too soon
however the promise of non-formal semantic theories out there make semantics more attractive, i have to say.
GRICES MAXIMS- YOU NEED TO DO A CRASH COURSE IN RESEARCH
Cool video!
2:48 euphemisms 👌🏼👌🏼
Love love love this series!!
My education borrowed the psychological term Schema. Packets of cultural information that attach themselves to phonemes which add meaning beyond their definition when formed into a word. Schema can also be entirely individual. What do you think of when you think of "A Fast Car" In America it's usually a red sports car, but it breaks down depending on the individual, and country of origin.
**Goes to the sandwich store**
-Hi, can I have a pizza? **Stares at the seller**
If bread is on both sides of a thing, it's a sandwich.
If bread is flat underneath a thing, it's a pizza.
If bread is folded to hold a thing, it's a taco.
If bread is wrapped to contain a thing, it's a burrito.
If it's a hot pocket, it isn't food, stop trying to call it food. ;)
Aww, I was hoping we'd segue into talking about scoping quantifiers over others! Ah well, the logician in me can always go do some lambda calculus to pass the time. Great video!
The Polish example is cloooooose but not 100%. wiedzieć is used for intransitive sentences with one exception, being wiem to, i know that (the fact thing)
znać is used for transitive sentences. not just people, but answers, words, etc.
Same in german, one word is for scientific/factual knowledge and the other is for being acquainted with someone/something.
This made me realise that British English has a much narrower definition of sandwich than American English.
Whats sandwich in Britain
I feel like the AE definition is muddied a lot by advertisement...
Best example is the "ice cream sandwich" - it was obviously called that because of its look _akin_ to a sandwich and to make it stand out from other cookie-and-cream ice products. But just because it sells well, doesn't mean it's actually a sandwich, right? If that was an argument, we'd also have to include small gelatenous sweet treats in the definition of "bear"...
not every speaker of every language or even is the same, though, or uses words in the same way - that's why there's sociolects and even idiolects! hoping this will get touched on in an episode on the sociocultural side + subfield of linguistics :)
@@ericBorja520 I personally drew the line when the definition started including fillings between rolls. Depending on where you are in England you call that a cob, a bap, a barm or a teacake, and I'm possibly forgetting a number of variations. I might be contradicted because that's dialect for you
Nice
This is giving me traumatic flashbacks to my introduction to Linguistics course at Uni 😂
Matpakke is food you bring from home to work, school or a trip, it's not a type of sandwich
seeing people in the comments talking about the Sandwich Debate, and even the Soup/Cereal convo, but the real question is: Is butt leg? (imo it totally is)
also i miss my semantics homework from my undergrad days. predicate calculus was fun, easy*, and impressed my non-ling friends bc they thought i was doing some super complicated math with all the funky symbols we were using by the end of that quarter.
*(for me, at the level we were at)
butt is not leg!!!!!!!!
-Nicole
Awesome
After watching this video, for some reason I want a pet rabbit and to name it Gav.
*Matpakke* means “packed lunch”. If you pack a burrito, then that's your matpakke. You could pack a bowl of salad, and it would still be a matpakke.
A person from Norway might usually pack a very simple sandwich with liver pate and multiple pieces of bread, but she could also bring lompe or lefse (flat bread) and it would still be a matpakke.
Pizzas are open face grilled cheese sandwiches. As an absurdist, I feel this is a fine hill to die on.
It's good to be able to identify your hill. I support you.
-NS
I've finally figured out why my brain is confused by a rabbit named Gav - I know very few words in Farsi, but one of them is "gav," which means "cow."
I was today years old when I learned people don't actually just wash their hands when they say they're going to go wash their hands.
Hold on! I am Norwegian and I've lived and visited places across the country. Vegimite is NOT a thing that is normal on "matpakka" (which means food package for anyone who wants to know). Just saying matpakka doesn't even have to contain bread it can be a salat if you want. But vegimite isn't a thing you can find outside of the biggest cities in Norway.
Meat used to mean food in general
This episodes makes me want to have a chom chom
Wiio's Laws might have something to say about how well we actually manage to communicate ideas...
Yes
9:00 As o formal (as in used to be, not fancily dressed) i need to dissagree with theese associated meanings.
All CC hosts like a rabbit means, that every particular CC host likes some (at least one) rabbit. Some can like more, some can like only one. Two or more can like the same rabbit (or several same rabits, while differ on others) or not, we dont know.
But it deffinetelly does not mean that Every CC host each like a different rabbit - that would be much stronger condition. (Unless you would define your language that way, but we are not constructing a english now, are we?)
Found the mathematician :D
I think they meant that every host likes a rabbit, and the rabbit is not necessarily the same one. They have to simplify for the sake of time
5:12 I feel like using the colors of the Subway logo was intentional
Is no one else gonna recognize that dude in the library at 0:59 is gorgeous?
So when someone says "that's semantics" what does that mean?
I'm really enjoying the content, but the captions are overlapping some of the callouts
“Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?”
― Melina Marchetta
First one to comment💬!!! 😂😂
Yeaaaaa!!! Partyyy🎉🎉🎉🎉
The person at 5:35 has their shirt on backward
will this crash course also cover "onthology"?
Is that even relevant?
Lol here in india some ppl have started using toilet/bathroom as verb instead of noun
Hi. I wish next time, I can see a segment in your channel that tackles everything about an education course . I hope so.
Cool
This video should come with a warning not to watch it on an empty stomach!
Let's not argue semantics now. 😁
"Words can also become narrower in their meaning. For example 'girl' used to mean 'child' and now it's more specific."
CC Oct. 9/20
Say what??
From Middle English gerle, girle, gyrle (“young person of any sex”), of uncertain origin. Probably from Old English gyrle, *gyrele, from Proto-Germanic *gurwilaz, a diminutive form of Proto-Germanic *gurwijaz (compare North Frisian gör (“girl”), Low German Gör, Göre (“child of either sex”), German Göre (“young child”), dialectal Norwegian gorre, dialectal Swedish garre, gurre (“small child”)), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰer- (“short”)[1] (compare Old Irish gair (“short”), Ancient Greek χρεώ (khreṓ, “need, necessity”), χρήσθαι (khrḗsthai, “to need”), Sanskrit ह्रस्व (hrasva, “short, small”)).
Etymology is from wiktionary btw
"girl" (or rather, its Middle English predecessor) could denote a child of either sex, now it's exclusively for female children.
Now its a female child. (althou, child also used to mean something else so im not sure to what timepoit it is refered here.)
@@RusNad Fun fact: We still use "Göre" in german for children of either sex, but the meaning narrowed to "brat" (i.e. uneducated ill-bred kids) instead.
There's a really nice TED talk (th-cam.com/video/F6NU0DMjv0Y/w-d-xo.html) that goes into how dictionaries work and what makes a word "real". At the end of the day, what words and phrases mean comes down to how people use them in context, which is why you can get a phrase like "I could care less" to mean "I don't care", even though that is literally the one thing it rules out. Whatever works!
00:12
Fun fact: The German word "gift" means poison.
Originally, it started out like well, gift in English. However, people assassinated each other by giving each other "gifts", and the meaning kind of stuck.
In the future, when you mention a scholar could you put their birthdate in? Or should I wait until the Pragmatics video to comment this...
Sandwich is edible stuff in between two other similar edible stuff...?
Isn't this definition ok?
This whole episode... its all semantics.
There are words that sound like what they are but (what are?): "the words that sound like what they are not-or something other than what they are or meant to mean"? Entomology and Etymology. Ento- sounds close enough to ants and by extension insects, fare enough mnemonic to give you a clue. But Ety- sounds like the personal pronoun of a Dugong, Manatee, or Loch Nessie's sister. Not the study of word hist/origins, nor the best example of what I was trying to convey. But anyway what are those words called? And then there is mnem: to remember, but what is the smallest definable/translatable word part or part that caries meaning/sound? It's my understanding that it's these subset comparisons is how word translation programs work.