Towards a Framework for Etymological Analysis of Literary and AI Works
Mike Horia Teodorescu, Cecilia Bolea, Horia-Nicolai Teodorescu · 2025
Etymology is a branch of linguistics concerned with finding the languages of origin of words, where the words may have evolved from an ancient language or are borrowed from an extant language. A recently proposed method of text and style analysis aims to determine the deeper layer of etymological distributions and features for characterizing text, in view of determination of style and authorship. Finding the etymological distribution adds to the complexity of text analysis. We discuss the complexity of this task and indicate ways of optimizing the etymological analysis. One way of balancing time and memory demands is to use an etymological dictionary in memory for the most used words in the language and searching over the Internet for the etymology of words that are probable hapax legomena in typical texts. A special topic treated is that of the etymological distribution of AI-generated texts.