calque

 In linguistics, a calque (/kælk/) or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation.

dissimilation

 In phonology, particularly within historical linguistics, dissimilation is a phenomenon whereby similar consonants or vowels in a word become less similar. In English, dissimilation is particularly common with liquid consonants such as /r/ and /l/ when they occur in a sequence. 

For example, Latin peregrinus > Old French pelegrin (and the Italian pellegrino and Sicilian piḍḍigrinu) which gave rise to the English pilgrim.

doublets

 

In etymology, two or more words in the same language are called doublets or etymological twins or twinlings (or possibly triplets, and so forth) when they have different phonological forms but the same etymological root. Often, but not always, the words entered the language through different routes. Given that the kinship between words that have the same root and the same meaning is fairly obvious, the term is mostly used to characterize pairs of words that have diverged at least somewhat in meaning.^[1] For example, English pyre and fire are doublets with merely associated meanings despite both descending ultimately from the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word *péh₂ur.

Ionians

The Ionians (/aɪˈoʊniənz/; Greek: Ἴωνες, Íōnes, singular Ἴων, Íōn) were one of the four major tribes that the Greeks considered themselves to be divided into during the ancient period; the other three being the Dorians, Aeolians, and Achaeans. The Ionian dialect was one of the three major linguistic divisions of the Hellenic world, together with the Dorian and Aeolian dialects. 

hyponym

In linguistics, a hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is included within that of another word, its hypernym (sometimes spelled hyperonym outside of the natural language processing community). In simpler terms, a hyponym shares a type-of relationship with its hypernym. For example, scarlet, vermilion, carmine, and crimson are all hyponyms of red (their hypernym), which is, in turn, a hyponym of colour.
Computer science often terms this relationship an "is-a" relationship. For example, the phrase Red is-a colour can be used to describe the hyponymic relationship between red and colour.

agglutination

In contemporary linguistics, agglutination usually refers to the kind of morphological derivation in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. For example, the Hungarian word hajókon `on ships' may be divided into a root hajó with two endings -k and -on expressing respectively the plural number (hajó-k `ships') and the location `on' something (hajó-n `on a ship'). Moreover, the ending -n is so regular that the Hungarian Wiktionary simply marks this case as "-on/-en/ön" (in English it is called superessive). In contrast to this, in the Czech translation v lodích, the location is expressed by a combination of a separate word (a preposition v `in') and the locative plural ending ích which is added to the stem loď `ship' and cannot be subdivided into a part expressing plural and a part expressing the locative case. Therefore Czech is not an agglutinative language.

polysemous

polysemous (not comparable)

1. (linguistics) Having multiple meanings or interpretations.

Epigraphy

Epigraphy (from the Greek: ἐπιγραφή epi-graphē, literally "on-writing", "inscription") is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the writing and the writers. Specifically excluded from epigraphy are the historical significance of an epigraph as a document and the artistic value of a literary composition.

A person using the methods of epigraphy is called an epigrapher or epigraphist. For example, the Behistun inscription is an official document of the Achaemenid Empire engraved on native rock at a location in Iran. Epigraphists are responsible for reconstructing, translating, and dating the trilingual inscription and finding any relevant circumstances. It is the work of historians, however, to determine and interpret the events recorded by the inscription as document. Often, epigraphy and history are competences practiced by the same person.

corpus

In linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed). They are used to do statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules on a specific universe.

False friend

False friends (French: faux amis) are pairs of words or phrases in two languages or dialects (or letters in two alphabets) that look or sound similar, but differ in meaning.

The term should be distinguished from "false cognates", which are similar words in different languages that appear to have a common historical linguistic origin (whatever their current meaning) but actually do not.

As well as complete false friends, use of loanwords often results in the use of a word in a restricted context, which may then develop new meanings not found in the original language.

phatic

In linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information. The term was coined by anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the early 1900s.

For example, "you're welcome" is not intended to convey the message that the hearer is welcome; it is a phatic response to being thanked, which in turn is a phatic whose function is to acknowledge the receipt of a benefit.

Dreimorengesetz

Dreimorengesetz is a German term which translates to "three-mora rule." This name is given to the rule for placing the accent in a Latin word. With few exceptions, Latin words are stressed on the penult (second-to-last syllable) if it is "heavy" (ending with a long vowel or consonant), and on the antepenult (third-to-last syllable) if the penult is "light" (ending with a short vowel.)

Coverb

Coverb is a term in theoretical linguistics most often applied in languages with serial verb construction, but also for complex predicates consisting of two verbs with one of them being an auxiliary verb contributing different kinds of information like modality, direction or aktionsart. It fulfills a similar function as adpositions would in many Indo-European languages like Dutch or Russian. Coverbs exist in a number of east and south-east Asian languages (e.g. Chinese), as well as west African languages (e.g. Yoruba).

Coverbs are differentiated from converbs, which are non-finite verb forms used to express subordination.

*Editor's note: I have no idea what any of this means.

grapheme

A grapheme (from the Greek: γράφω, gráphō, "write") is a fundamental unit in a written language. Examples of graphemes include alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems, although arguably^{[citation needed]} a diacritical mark or ancillary glyph does not constitute a grapheme.

In a fully phonemic orthography, a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme. However this is very much the exception. In spelling systems that are to some extent non-phonemic, such as in English, multiple graphemes may represent a single phoneme. These are called digraphs (two graphemes for a single phoneme) and trigraphs (three graphemes). For example, the word ship contains four graphemes (s, h, i, and p) but only three phonemes, because sh is a digraph. Conversely, a single grapheme can represent multiple phonemes, or no phonemes at all in the case of 'silent' letters: the English word "box" has three graphemes, but four phonemes: /bɒks/.

collocation

Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance.

lexeme

A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN.

Markedness

Markedness is a linguistic concept that developed out of the Prague School. A marked form is a non-basic or less natural form. An unmarked form is a basic, default form. For example, lion is the unmarked choice in English — it could refer to a male or female lion. But lioness is marked because it can only refer to females. The unmarked forms serve as general terms: e.g. brotherhood of man has sometimes been used to refer all people, both men and women, while sisterhood refers only to women. The form of a word that is conventionally chosen to be the lemma form is typically the form that is the least marked.

Polysemy

Polysemy (from the Greek πολυσημεία = "multiple meaning") is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a word, phrase, etc.) or signs to have multiple meanings (sememes, i.e. a large semantic field). This is a pivotal concept within social sciences, such as media studies and linguistics.