chronicle, history, account, story - a record or narrative description of past events; "a history of France"; "he gave an inaccurate account of the plot to kill the president"; "the story of exposure to lead"

folk etymology - a popular but erroneous etymology

linguistics - the scientific study of language

lexicostatistics - a statistical technique used in glottochronology; used to estimate how long ago different languages evolved from a common source language