Semantic
From the Greek noun sema, “sign”. The corresponding verb form, semainein, meant “to show” or “to indicate by a sign”, and from that came the adjective semantikos, “significant”, “important”. The word lay dormant in Greek dictionaries until 1883, when it was borrowed into French by a linguist as sémantique to refer to the psychology of language. It entered English as semantic ten years later, meaning “pertaining to the relationship between linguistic symbols and their meanings”. The science of semantics is the study of language and meaning. (Prior to the 1890’s, semantics was known as semasiology.)
Personally, my linguistics degree focused on phonology (the study of the sounds of language), computational linguistics (programming computers to handle language), and lexical semantics (the study of the meanings of words), particularly verbs.
Phonosemantically, semantic’s primary syllable is “man”, which concerns the manifestation of a balanced energy that narrows toward a target. This may reflect the same sense as is found in idioms like “that’s the meaning I’m going for“, or “that’s what I’m driving at” (i.e. that’s the meaning I’m trying to convey), the fact that language is usually manifested with a target of conveying meaning.
