Inventing Words

Someone once told me that most new words (terms) are variations on a theme, that is: new concepts are created using existing words. In some cases, whether or not a compound term (consisting of multiple words) is created matters. Stephanie Hendrick gives a nice example in how Google changes our language. She takes into account hyphenation and contraction: walking stick, walking-stick and walkingstick (different concepts) and uses Google to determine what is what. Are there many genuinely new words? Not many I guess. Let's try. network and internet appear genuine, although a nitpicker might suggest they are contractions of existing words (given that the original meaning of the part words is lost I would tend to disagree). Two words that appear genuinely new are google (used both as a noun and as a verb as Stephanie mentions, this is even accepted practice in the Dutch language!) and blog. However, google is an orthographical variant of the word googol (meaning: 10 power 10, a really large number) and only the use of google as a verb is really new (it was invented by the users; compare to "to xerox"). As we all know blog is a contraction of weblog and this is also a case were a noun inspired users to create a new verb: to blog and morphological variants like blogging.

Inventing words is not easy. But, as Stephanie suggested, using something like Google to determine what people use is a useful and a fun way of discovering terms. I know the rules. Try "ontological fingerprinting" and "blogtrace". How Google changes our language? If all is well it does not, it records it.

Comments

[ingo]

Hm,, why do you think that internet is original? Its always been introduced to me as as a contraction of 'network' with the 'inter-' prefix attached. 'network' is quite old (even though it would be interesting, etymologically speaking, to see where it got applied to computer networks) and IIRC, 'inter' is latin for 'between'.

[Anjo]

Expanding "internet" to "between networks" and then expanding "network" to something like "(physically) connected entities" causes me to go into loop. Why do we need "inter" here as "network" already seems to imply it? Network itself is interesting as, these days, it no longer refers to physically connected entities, but also to social connections (and I'm wondering why a new word has not been invented to capture the difference between the two meanings of network, it does appear awfully difficult to invent new words and get accepted).

[Victor]

I started wondering about the things above and stumbled upon this website. It lists the various categories of 'new word formation processes'.

http://www.wordorigins.org/Methods.htm

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The above are just some examples of how posts are linked over time. Do these links (and the networks they depict) constitute a conversation? This is a tricky question. The colours and the distribution over time provide some clues, but the meat of the matter has to come from text analysis. Is there a common topic that can be identified? Or, phrased otherwise, can it be determined "why" bloggers join the conversation?

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