# Words cannot be created out of nothing



## Testing1234567

I will try very hard to make myself clear.

Are any words ever created out of nothing? Yes, words can be coined, but coining is only creating words with existing particles. For example, I believe that all words in the list of neologisms are not created out of nothing. I have not got enough time to go through them one by one, but I believe that none of the words in the list is spontaneous.

Then, a problem arises. Where, then, are the origin of the original words? (no pun intended)

For example, where does "hand" come from? If one searches the etymology dictionaries, one can find that it comes from Middle English "hand" and then from Old English "hand". Then, I would ask, where does the Old English word come from? Linguists would say that there is a hypothetical "Proto-Germanic language" that all Germanic languages descend from. Then, they would say that Old English "hand" comes from Proto-Germanic "handuz". Then, where would that word come from?

As I have just proved, words cannot come from nowhere, and all words must have an origin, because I fail to find any recent created words.

I apologize if I cannot be understood.


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## rbrunner

Testing1234567 said:


> As I have just proved, words cannot come from nowhere, and all words must have an origin, because I fail to find any recent created words.



I think it is rather premature to say that you "proved" something just because you cannot come up with counter-examples right now.

What about this: Names for companies and products are sometimes really created out of nothing, right? People sit together and try to come up with something catchy and good-sounding, and sometimes they just create some new name out of thin air - they don't always limit themselves to something existing or just combine or alter existing word or syllable material. That's the first step.

Now, in a second step, the product becomes so much used or the company so well known that the name is turned into a normal word: _to google_ became a verb, meaning to look something up on the Internet. _to xerox_ something can mean to use a copier to duplicate a document. I learned in the Philippines that their word for "toothpaste" is _colgate_ and their word for "photo camera" was at one time _kodak_.

I am sure that if one just looks long enough one can find a product or company name created "out of thin air" that was turned into a noun or a verb. (I did not yet check my examples above in this respect.) And just one real counter-example falsifies a proof.


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## Testing1234567

Xerox: Haloid coined the term Xerography from two Greek roots meaning "dry writing".

Google: Misspelling of googol

Colgate: Name of founder


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## Ben Jamin

Testing1234567 said:


> Xerox: Haloid coined the term Xerography from two Greek roots meaning "dry writing".
> 
> Google: Misspelling of googol
> 
> Colgate: Name of founder


I started a very similar thread a couple of weeks ago at this forum, and you can find some interesting posts there.
My hypothese was that creating words frpm fantasy (from nothing) is extremely rare, and it was even more rare in older times, so almost all words in a language are coined on the original stems of a protolanguage, or are loaned from another language (often from an unknown language called substrate). This hypothese of mine was created to counter a statement from an article I found in the Web that said that there are no words coming from an unknown substrate in any language, only words created from nothing.
However, this thread did not conclude anything, as the participants couldn't refer to any research.


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## fdb

All words come from somewhere. We can trace many English words to proto-Germanic, then perhaps to proto-Indo-European; many (like myself) would stop there, but some would go back further to Nostratic and eventually to proto-World. But at some point you arrive at ground zero, inhabited by grunting cave men. Plato (in his dialogue “Kratylos”) stages a debate on whether language is “by nature” (physei) or “by convention” (thesei), without coming to a conclusion. I think the question is still open.


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## rbrunner

Testing1234567 said:


> Xerox: Haloid coined the term Xerography from two Greek roots meaning "dry writing".
> 
> Google: Misspelling of googol
> 
> Colgate: Name of founder



I was indeed suspecting that I did not yet score a hit with my handful of examples. But anyway, I would not give up too soon on _to google_: Yes, "only" a misspelling of _googol_, but what about that word? Seems it comes from a 9-year old who was asked to propose a name for an enormous number, and who knows where the boy got that word from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Kasner



Ben Jamin said:


> I started a very similar thread a couple of weeks ago at this forum, and you can find some interesting posts there.


That's probably this thread:
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2956091


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## Delvo

fdb said:


> We can trace many English words to proto-Germanic, then perhaps to proto-Indo-European; many (like myself) would stop there, but some would go back further to Nostratic and eventually to proto-World. But at some point you arrive at ground zero, inhabited by grunting cave men. Plato (in his dialogue “Kratylos”) stages a debate on whether language is “by nature” (physei) or “by convention” (thesei), without coming to a conclusion. I think the question is still open.


Unfortunately, the farther back we try to reconstruct, the fewer words we can actually get, because the uncertainty at each step of the way is cumulative. We only have hundreds to a few thousand words of PIE, and that gets us roughly 6000 years back. Proto-World would need to have been spoken about ten times as long ago. And _that_ language would probably have a history of at least a few hundred-thousand to one or two million years of previous language before you get back to a time when our ancestors' communication couldn't be called a language. And even whatever we had then would have been more than nothing, something semi-language-like. A species of monkey called "Campbell's monkey" has separate warning-calls for danger from above (like eagles or loose branches) and danger from below (like leopards), and generalized all-inclusive danger calls, but the details of exactly when to use which have subtle shifts from one population to another. Our last common ancestor with them was something like 40 million years ago.


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## Shiggles McWhigley

What about onomatopoeia or imitative words? The words _oink _and _meow _were derived from the sound that a specific beast made rather than any word already created. Maybe I don't fully understand the issue at hand here 

It is rather difficult to come up with words that aren't formed from other words. With the exception of imitative words, I'm at a complete loss.


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## Encolpius

I think here are some interesting examples...


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## M Mira

Without spelling to maintain pronunciation, sounds can shift real fast. Because of a lip-reading incident that was recorded in writing, we know that a subset of /y/ in Mandarin was actually /a/ in 7th century BC Chinese. 90% of vocabularies of any given language may well be derived from some onomatopoeias but it's impossible to tell without a time machine.


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## sotos

> For example, where does "hand" come from?


What if we put the question like this: The sound "hand" existed (at least as a possibility) eversince humans existed . It is one of the millions of sounds that a human can produce. How it got a "meaning"? Why the same meaning in chinese is given with the sound "te"?
The answer may be similar to the question  _how some DNA  has "meaning" while other is "senseless"? _But "meaning" and "sense" is the ability to assist life and, in the case of genes, I think it happens randomly.  Unless you believe in creation by a god.


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## Riverplatense

I think the question of the origin of languages has something in common with the origin of live (and so have biological and linguistic evolution). We see the present state; about the origins, however, there's only speculation, even though biology can fall back upon examples which are pretty old indeed, while all serious linguistic sources are extremely new. Nothing can be proofed and there always remains something difficult to understand or even to believe. Maybe in biolinguistics there are some interesting bases, but in any case it's difficult to find a satisfying answer for where the first words came from, how morphological structures arose. I think the only thing we really can say about it is the well-known arbitrariness of linguistic signs. I wouldn't say there's no arguments for speculations, but everything related to this question is necessarily extremely vague.


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## Forero

_Grok_, in the list mentioned in #1, was coined from as close to nothing as I can imagine. It was meant to express a lot in one syllable without being an acronym or abbreviation of anything else. And it was meant to sound unlike anything in English, or in any other Earth language. Wasn't it?


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## Riverplatense

Forero said:


> _Grok_, in the list mentioned in #1, was coined from as close to nothing as I can imagine. It was meant to express a lot in one syllable without being an acronym or abbreviation of anything else. And it was meant to sound unlike anything in English, or in any other Earth language. Wasn't it?



In any case words _can_ be created out of, more or less, nothing. But they hardly will be integrated into the linguistic social contract. Considering that there's only a limited inventory of sounds and limited possibilities of combining them I also doubt that there are words with only one or two syllables not appearing in any other language, unless one takes something like occlusive clusters.


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## Forero

Riverplatense said:


> In any case words _can_ be created out of, more or less, nothing. But they hardly will be integrated into the linguistic social contract. Considering that there's only a limited inventory of sounds and limited possibilities of combining them I also doubt that there are words with only one or two syllables not appearing in any other language, unless one takes something like occlusive clusters.


I don't know what you mean by "social contract", but _grok_ is a word most of us are now familiar with and some of us find useful.


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## Ben Jamin

Riverplatense said:


> In any case words _can_ be created out of, more or less, nothing. But they hardly will be integrated into the linguistic social contract. Considering that there's only a limited inventory of sounds and limited possibilities of combining them I also doubt that there are words with only one or two syllables not appearing in any other language, unless one takes something like occlusive clusters.


You don't really *create* a word of it is not accepted and used. You can *generate *thousands of words, but if they don't get into use you have created nothing.


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## Ben Jamin

It is obvoius that new words CAN be generated out of existing sounds in a given language, and they can be taken in use if they comply with the phonetic rules of the language and if the people feel a need of such a word. However, words generated in this manner are very scarce, and they don't constitute mor than a little fraction of a percent of all the words used in any language. Most new words are derived from existing words and word stems. Of course, in the beginning of the creation of human language the completely new, underived words abounded, but after there were created some thousands words the number of new stems declined rapidly.


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## Riverplatense

Forero said:


> I don't know what you mean by "social contract", but _grok_ is a word most of us are now familiar with and some of us find useful.



That's what I meant with «linguistic social contract». The inventory of words people really use. I have to admit I did not know the word _grok_, but I thought it would be difficult for words like this, without a linguistic evolution or a comprehensible creation out of existing words, to be commonly used.


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## ancalimon

Ben Jamin said:


> You don't really *create* a word of it is not accepted and used. You can *generate *thousands of words, but if they don't get into use you have created nothing.



I think you underestimate the power of clergy. Especially the clergy of Aryan. Wasn't it them who changed the language of Europe after invading Europe?


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## Treaty

One of the artificially invented words that has found acceptance is Lilliputian (we can think of Norse _lille _or colloquial English _li'lle_, though). Anyway, without agreeing on what "nothing" and "out of nothing" mean, the discussion won't go anyway. I would consider "nothing" as the lack of mindfulness (including the will to imitate sounds) in creating words.
.


ancalimon said:


> I think you underestimate the power of clergy. Especially the clergy of Aryan. Wasn't it them who changed the language of Europe after invading Europe?



They are called Indo-European speakers not Aryans. The latter didn't migrate or invade Europe in mass scale. Besides, probably none of the words of those "invaders" were created or even generated at that time or later (in the way suggested in posts #14 to #17). I don't find a reason to believe the clergy had taken a major role in the change of the language.


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## ancalimon

Treaty said:


> They are called Indo-European speakers not Aryans. The latter didn't migrate or invade Europe in mass scale. Besides, probably none of the words of those "invaders" were created or even generated at that time or later (in the way suggested in posts #14 to #17). I don't find a reason to believe the clergy had taken a major role in the change of the language.



Weren't the first known Indo-European speakers called the Aryans? As far as I can deduct from what I have read about them, they were a cast of elite clergymen with higher culture and technology than the people they conquered. After their invasion of Europe, they changed the genetic makeup and language of most of European people except the people living in Britain (probably due to it being an island) (as can be seen here: http://www.ias.ac.in/jgenet/Vol83No1/39.pdf )


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## berndf

Treaty said:


> They are called Indo-European speakers not Aryans.


Historically, the terms were often used synonymously. The term _Aryan_ is avoided today because of its use in Nazi and other racist ideologies.


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## Treaty

berndf said:


> Historically, the terms were often used synonymously. The term _Aryan_ is avoided today because of its use in Nazi and other racist ideologies.



Historically, many terms had been used for many things. It doesn't mean we can use them today, especially, as the association of the term "Aryan" with proto-Germanic, Slav and Celtic people who migrated in Europe is derived from a similarly racial idea (plus a linguistic mistake about "Eire"). And also because there are a large number of people who are unhappy that their cultural heritage is mistreated as a racist idea (well, some of the abuser are from the same culture anyway).


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## berndf

Treaty said:


> It doesn't mean we can use them today


The old use still occurs occasionally. Your statement 


Treaty said:


> They are called Indo-European speakers not Aryans


is too absolute. I of course agree with you that the term _Aryian_ shouldn't be used in this meaning.


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## fdb

The name arya and ārya was used as a self-designation by the ancient Indo-Aryans and Iranians (sometimes called Irano-Aryans; the names “arya” and “Iran” are in any case etymologically identical) and not demonstrably by any other Indo-European-speaking peoples. Some scholars in the 19th century used “Aryan” in a broader sense to mean “Indo-European”; this is not the usage of any scholars today, though we do sometimes use “Aryan” as a synonym for “Indo-Iranian”. The only Aryans (in the strict sense) who have played a role in the history of Europe were the ancient Alans, the Jassic/Sarmatian people in Hungary, and of course the Gypsies.


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## bearded

If  one considers the length of human history before writing was invented, and the comparatively short time that has elapsed since that invention, I think that the search for the 'origin' of words is a hopeless undertaking.  We only know something about ancient written - and therefore documented - languages, and can reconstruct (discussed models of) the languages they originate from, but before that a complete darkness dominates.  I should think that in pre-historic eras thousands of languages, of which we know nothing, had the time for arising, having their evolution and dying out. The OP question ''where are the origins of the original words?'' does not make much sense, as it cannot be answered.


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## ManOfWords

Interesting thread guys!


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## Encolpius

While learning to count in a new foreign language I realized there is logic among numbers 1-10 but you cannot see any connection or logic in their names...
Don't you think numbers were just made out of nothing?


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## ger4

Just a thought: aren't word stems often based on something like onomatopoeia? Having had a look at some of the Swadesh lists on wiktionary.org it striked me that across many - unrelated - languages, front vowels ('bright' vowels) often appear in words expressing something relatively near, close, little, accessible etc. Could there be some kind of a pattern or is it simply coincidence? Just a few random examples (English, Estonian, Indonesian):

here, siin, sini <> there, seal, sana
this, see, ini <> that, too, itu
few, vähe, sedikit <> many, palju, banjak
thin, peenike, tipis <> thick, paks, tebal
near, lähedal, dekat <> far, kauge, jauh


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## Ben Jamin

Holger2014 said:


> Just a thought: aren't word stems often based on something like onomatopoeia? Having had a look at some of the Swadesh lists on wiktionary.org it striked me that across many - unrelated - languages, front vowels ('bright' vowels) often appear in words expressing something relatively near, close, little, accessible etc. Could there be some kind of a pattern or is it simply coincidence? Just a few random examples (English, Estonian, Indonesian):
> 
> here, siin, sini <> there, seal, sana
> this, see, ini <> that, too, itu
> few, vähe, sedikit <> many, palju, banjak
> thin, peenike, tipis <> thick, paks, tebal
> near, lähedal, dekat <> far, kauge, jauh


I can't see any pattern here. I think that looking for a relation between the sound of words and their meaning has been largely futile, except some isolated onomatopoeic words.


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## sotos

I have the theory that some words were intentionally and randomly altered during their history, for the purpose of not being understood by external groups, or just to differentiate one group from the other.


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## Ben Jamin

sotos said:


> I have the theory that some words were intentionally and randomly altered during their history, for the purpose of not being understood by external groups, or just to differentiate one group from the other.


An example of what you wrote is prison jargon. But even there most words are not invented from scratch but have a changed meaning or are based on existing word roots.


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