tribal

The story

1. German · learned borrowing fromStammesgeschichte
2. Latin · borrowed fromtribālis
3. English todaytribal

From Latin tribālis. By surface analysis, tribe + -al, first attested in the 1630s. The specific adjectival sense under the defunct theory of recapitulation derives from tribal history as an overly literal learned borrowing from German Stammesgeschichte; ordinarily, Stamm would only be translated as tribe when used in its ethnographic sense.

Words from the same roots