Stage 5: Interrelation

From Latin inter (“between”) + relātiō (“a carrying back, reference”). To interrelate is to establish connections—to reveal the hidden kinships that bind words across languages and centuries. Since William Jones observed in 1786 that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin share “a stronger affinity...than could possibly have been produced by accident”, comparative linguistics has traced these family relationships through systematic sound correspondences and semantic parallels.

Within the editorial lifecycle, Interrelation extends the Crystallization phase by mapping each entry into its proper place within the etymological graph. Like constructing the Stammbaum—the family tree model pioneered by nineteenth-century philologists—this stage traces derivation pathways through Old French, Latin, Greek, and back to reconstructed proto-languages, revealing how English 'father,' German 'Vater,' Latin 'pater,' and Sanskrit 'pitṛ' all descend from Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr.

Process

• Pathway extraction: Derivation routes are identified from etymological data—which languages a word passed through, and in what sequence.
• Node placement: Parent lexemes in source languages are located or created within the graph structure.
• Edge establishment: Relationships are formalized with metadata: borrowing type, approximate date, semantic shifts during transmission.
• Cognate linking: Cross-linguistic relatives—words sharing common ancestry across different language families—are connected.

The Etymology Graph

Etymology is not mere metadata—it is the connective tissue of language itself. The resulting graph structure enables powerful scholarly queries: tracing all English words descended from Latin portāre (to carry)—import, export, transport, report, support—or mapping how the semantic field of 'virtue' evolved from Latin virtus (manliness, valor) through centuries of philosophical reinterpretation. The graph makes visible what prose etymology can only describe.