Also available to one who feels the need for a new word to name a new thing or express a new idea is the very considerable store of prefixes, suffixes, and combining forms that already exist in English. Some of these are native and others are borrowed from French, but the largest number have been taken directly from Latin or Greek, and they have been combined in may different ways often without any special regard for matching two elements from the same original language.
The combination of these word elements has produced many scientific and technical terms of Modern English. Once in a while, a word is created spontaneously out of the creative play of sheer imagination. Words such as boondoggle and googol are examples of such creative coinages, but most such inventive brand-new words do not gain sufficiently widespread use to gain dictionary entry unless their coiner is well known enough so his or her writings are read, quoted, and imitated. British author Lewis Carroll was renowned for coinages such as jabberwocky , galumph , and runcible , but most such new words are destined to pass in and out of existence with very little notice from most users of English.
An etymologist tracing the history of a dictionary entry must review the etymologies at existing main entries and prepare such etymologies as are required for the main entries being added to the new edition.
In the course of the former activity, adjustments must sometimes be made either to incorporate a useful piece of information that has been previously overlooked or to review the account of the word's origin in light of new evidence. Such evidence may be unearthed by the etymologist or may be the product of published research by other scholars. In writing new etymologies, the etymologist must, of course, be alive to the possible languages from which a new term may have been created or borrowed, and must be prepared to research and analyze a wide range of documented evidence and published sources in tracing a word's history.
The etymologist must sift theories, often-conflicting theories of greater or lesser likelihood, and try to evaluate the evidence conservatively but fairly to arrive at the soundest possible etymology that the available information permits.
When all attempts to provide a satisfactory etymology have failed, an etymologist may have to declare that a word's origin is unknown. The label "origin unknown" in an etymology seldom means that the etymologist is unaware of various speculations about the origin of a term, but instead usually means that no single theory conceived by the etymologist or proposed by others is well enough backed by evidence to include in a serious work of reference, even when qualified by "probably" or "perhaps.
Log in Sign Up. Where do new words come from? That's a tough question because there are 6, languages in the world and they all have different words for things, and we can't go back in time so we will probably never know what those first words were.
Some people have said that it must have had to do with imitating the sounds that things make. That may work with some things, but most things don't make sounds. It's hard to say what would have lead people to come up with some kind of word like 'sun' or 'tree,' or something like 'already' or 'maybe. We'll never know why they came up with those words, but we know once they did, there seemed to have never been any more people who didn't have any words. Like the clouds in the sky are always moving, the sounds are always changing a little bit.
The word 'tree' used to be pronounced more like 'tray,' but you might be hearing something more like 'tree,' so you're going to grow up saying something in between.
Then the person who listens to you talking and learns how to talk may say it more like 'tree. If you imagine that happening to every word in every language all the time, you know why one language could never stay the way it was. It's always inching along and changing to a new language. Take all of those changes happening to every word all the time and it means that you're going to get two different languages, one on one side of the mountain and one on the other side.
There is no reason. The order of the alphabet has never made any sense. All we know is that the people who invented the first alphabet put the letters in a certain order. Different slang is used amongst different cultures, popular interests, occupations or where you live. For example, I used to work at a ski resort in the Rocky Mountains and all the skiers had their own slang, which was only known amongst skiers.
If we said some of these slang words in a group of non-skiers, or in a state where there is no snow, no one would know what we were talking about.
And there are many more. I actually had to learn these slang words when I first started living at the ski area. I thought maybe he was a very spiritual, peaceful person therefore people referred to him as the famous Indian peace leader, Gandhi. Slang expressions are created in basically the same way as standard speech.
However, in order for the expression to survive, it must be widely adopted by the group who uses it. Similarly, the words shit and science , thanks to a long sequence of shifts and errors, are both ultimately derived from the same root. And the now defunct word helpmeet, or helpmate, is the result of a Biblical boo-boo. Later editors, less familiar with the archaic sense of meet, took the phrase to be a word, and began hyphenating help-meet.
Take one word, remove an arbitrary portion of it, then put in its place either a whole word, or a similarly clipped one. Thus were born sitcom, paratroops, internet, gazunder and sexting. Note: some linguists call this process blending and reserve the term portmanteau for a particular subtype of blend. The popularity of the various methods has waxed and waned through the ages. For long periods and , borrowings from French were in vogue. There was even a brief onslaught from Dutch and Flemish.
In the 20th century, quite a few newbies were generated by derivation, using the -ie and -y suffix: talkies, freebie, foodie, hippy, roomie, rookie, roofie, Munchie, Smartie, Crunchie, Furby, scrunchie. Abbreviations, though, were the preferred MO, perhaps because of the necessity in wartime of delivering your message ASAP.
0コメント