I recently leaned the rather fascinating fact that 97% of all Wikipedia pages lead to "philosophy" if you click the first link that shows up enough times. There are many theories as to why this pattern exists, but at least one explanation is that philosophy is the most wide-ranging field, the "mother of all sciences". This is sort of reflected in the word's etymology: through Old French filosofie and Latin, it comes from the Ancient Greek word philosophia, which meant "loving wisdom". The roots there are philos, or "beloved" (which is from philein, meaning "to love", and eventually has an unknown origin), and sophos, which meant "wisdom" (and eventually derives from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction sehp, "to try", but that's contested). Usage of the word philosophy has decreased since the early 1960s.
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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