# Making new words from fantasy



## Ben Jamin

I came across an article arguing the existence of a foreign substrate in a language. The author explained words without any etymological roots in his language as “made up” words, and definitely “not coming from any substrate language”.
Most new words in any language have either an etymological root in the language itself, or are loans, or may be in some cases, are onomatopoeic words. As far as I know, making completely new words “from fantasy” is rather rare. I can, at the moment think only of one such word “googol”, even if this can be classified as an onomatopoeic word. Words made from acronyms also should be regarded as having etymology in the language.

Now, do you know any language where coining of new words completely unrelated to anything known really occurs on a larger scale, such as to substantiate the possibility of a large number of words made up in historical times from scratch?


----------



## ahvalj

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Aavik


----------



## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Aavik


Thanks for the link! Interesting reading. It would be interesting to find out how many of his neologisms survived.
As to "roim" for "crime", it seems to be a phonetically adjusted loan: crime /krajm/ > kroim > roim (like Finnish "suuri" from Swedish "stor".)

I think also, that the area where new made up words may get easily adapted is science and technology, but still there are fes of them in the established languages.
Estonian is an example of a "new, emerging languages" in the sense of changing the status of the language.
I suppose that Ivrit  might contain a number of totally made up words.


----------



## ahvalj

_Suuri_ is inherited 
[Update: http://www.eki.ee/dict/ety/index.cgi?Q=suur&F=M&C06=et suggests a Germanic borrowing, though from a different root, but I am not convinced, in particular why _st_- gave _s_- and not _t_- ?]. 
 [Update 2. The book _Основы финно-угорского языкознания. Прибалтийско-финские, саамский и мордовские языки (1975):_ 113 mentions _suure_- as a Baltic-Finnic word, absent in other Uralic languages, but doesn't list it under borrowings].

Aavik's _relv_ is also obviously made from _revolver_. I have a book with some more words mentioned, but probably an Estonian speaker may provide a better insight.


----------



## ahvalj

Also, Hungarian in the end of the 18th and the 19th centuries survived a period of massive language planning, with hundreds if not thousands of words introduced, but I was unable to find examples of lexemes invented from scratch: the examples found in the literature are all based on some pre-existing Hungarian words or morphemes.


----------



## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> _Suuri_ is inherited


I had read the two kinds of explanations of "suuri" earlier, but neither seems to have taken the upper hand. 
Th underlaying question "can old words without any etymology in the protolangauge be explained as "made-ups" remains still to be answered. I, personally, don't believe that it could. The phenomenon of making words from scratch seems to be rather modern, and limited.


----------



## ahvalj

But every language and group of languages have words absent in the nearest relatives. For example, in Slavic there are Common Slavic, West Slavic, Lechitic and specifically Polish words (and, further, words specific to some dialects within the language). Many of them have no chances to turn out to be borrowings, so by default they are considered created out of nothing. Compare e. g. the modern slang. Let's not forget the children's word-creation.


----------



## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> But every language and group of languages have words absent in the nearest relatives. For example, in Slavic there are Common Slavic, West Slavic, Lechitic and specifically Polish words (and, further, words specific to some dialects within the language). Many of them have no chances to turn out to be borrowings, so by default they are considered created out of nothing. Compare e. g. the modern slang. Let's not forget the children's word-creation.


But most of those words absent from related langauges er built on exixting IE-roots or loans. Some words have obscure etymology, and possibly some of them have been made up, but we don't know which ones. Some words that don't look like anything familiar turn out to have plausible etymologies. Can you list som of such made up words in Russian, or another language?


----------



## ahvalj

East Slavic is not a good object because anything unexplicable can be easily ascribed to extinct substrate or adstrate  languages. For example, the word _хороший_ "good" has no clear etymology and, depending on the author's phantasy, is regarded either as Iranic, or as a nursery word (from _хоробрый_ "brave"), or somehow else. I will try to find not very ancient examples, however. By the way, modern English seems most perspective in this sense.


----------



## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> East Slavic is not a good object because anything unexplicable can be easily ascribed to extinct substrate or adstrate  languages. For example, the word _хороший_ "good" has no clear etymology and, depending on the author's phantasy, is regarded either as Iranic, or as a nursery word (from _хоробрый_ "brave"), or somehow else. I will try to find not very ancient examples, however. By the way, modern English seems most perspective in this sense.


I made a quick survey, and found a list of English words allegedly of unknown origin http://www.musanim.com/mam/unknown.html.
At closer scrutiny many of these words look like made up of known elements (humbug = hum+bug), (bamboozle = bamboo+fancy suffix), have African origin (jazz), and so on. Genuine 100% made up words seem as rare here as in other languages (even if they are more of them in absolute figures, relatively they are equally rare, English has more words than other languages).

One of the most intriguing words of unknown origin in Polish is *kat* (executioner).


----------



## rur1920

Widget, hobbit, quark come into the mind readily. Also Jabberwocky (Бармаглот in Russian), Snark (Снарк), and so on. I do not even mention (do I?) those monstrous _foo_ or _bazz_. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to create a word without any motivation (when I was a child, I actually tried once, and guess what, did not succeed), but let us consider words in artificial languages like _Quenya_ or _Sindarin_. There, they are motivated by the taste of the author, though… And, of course, unless either such words turn out to be too beautiful _and_ inspiring at the same time, or unless there such a tradition of the kind "a word is a word is a word, words never matter only what they denote does", there is no hope for these neologisms to catch on. In the case of the latter tradition, a door opens wide for many strange abbreviations and portmanteaux, some of which could hardly be told apart from "fantasy words" (there was a hypothesis, for example, that hobbit stands for homo + rabbit, which Tolkien denied and did rightly ;-) ).


----------



## OBrasilo

- rur1920: Actually, widget is a portmanteau of window and gadget.

Edit: Seems there's two words with the same spelling and pronunciation but different origins and meanings. One is of unknown origins, while the other is from window and gadget.


----------



## mataripis

The meaning of words always came from old root word in any language.the process of reversing the spell of words(+ suffixes) were common in Austronesians of Phil. Islands that resulted to creations of new words with new sounds and meanings or uses.


----------



## rur1920

In Russian: крюкозябра. This word means a character that is not displayed in any meaningful way by a device. The word itself, in derivation, is meaningless, though of course it contains an audial reference to крюк — a hook. Another version of the same word, крякозябра, contains an audial reference to the sound that ducks make. I've encountered also some other words, of course not many, that derive their meaning from nothing yet have an audial reference to something; in a way, they do derive their meaning from something, only not in an established "morphemical" way.


----------



## rur1920

rur1920 said:


> Indeed, it is nearly impossible to create a word without any motivation


Making new words from fantasy while talking (and with motivations suggested in the talk?) is actually quite possible (at least I do it from time to time), but in order to be caught on, the rationale of the new word must be obvious to many people (including those who never speak to each other) in a similar manner, so it would not be a source of new words usually… For example, of an idea that is fruitless I might say that this is «цвынтик, пустышка» (the first word is not derived from anything, except the ending -тик), but no-one would say that word a second time; it would only become a one-time-use occasional word, like many other words of this kind.


----------



## Dymn

Interesting thread. I'll copy the following text, that mentions many words which, according to the author, were created from scratch in English. However, I've searched some of them in Etymonline  and all of them seem to have proposed etymolgies. Of course we would have then to look for the origin of those etymolgies, and so on, so we would never reach the first one, and if so, we wouldn't know it unless it is quite modern. Curious debate, I insist. Let's see:


> Many of the new words added to the ever-growing lexicon of the English language are just created from scratch, and often have little or no etymological pedigree. A good example is the word dog, etymologically unrelated to any other known word, which, in the late Middle Ages, suddenly and mysteriously displaced the Old English word hound (or hund) which had served for centuries. Some of the commonest words in the language arrived in a similarly inexplicable way (e.g. jaw, askance, tantrum, conundrum, bad, big, donkey, kick, slum, log, dodge, fuss, prod, hunch, freak, bludgeon, slang, puzzle, surf, pour, slouch, bash, etc).
> 
> Words like gadget, blimp, raunchy, scam, nifty, zit, clobber, boffin, gimmick, jazz and googol have all appeared in the last century or two with no apparent etymology, and are more recent examples of this kind of novel creation of words. Additionally, some words that have existed for centuries in regional dialects or as rarely used terms, suddenly enter into popular use for little or no apparent reason (e.g. scrounge and seep, both old but obscure English words, suddenly came into general use in the early 20th Century).
> 
> Sometimes, if infrequently, a "nonce word" (created "for the nonce", and not expected to be re-used or generalized) does become incorporated into the language. One example is James Joyce's invention quark, which was later adopted by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann to name a new class of sub-atomic particle, and another is blurb, which dates back to 1907.


My hypothesis is that the vast majority of words come from distorted initial roots that tribes took from interpretation of natural noises, such as onomatopoeias. Human communication was at first extremely simple, but it evolved slowly, with huge changes in meanings, phonology and grammar; which adquired many quirks that have arrived to our times. However, it may be true that some of those words were created from scratch, I don't know. Linguists specialized in this field must have a hugely better approach to this debate.


----------



## Unoverwordinesslogged

> Many of the new words added to the ever-growing lexicon of the  English  language are just created from scratch, and often have little  or no  etymological pedigree. *A good example is the word dog, etymologically  unrelated to any other known word*,  which, in the late Middle Ages,  suddenly and mysteriously displaced  the Old English word hound (or hund)  which had served for centuries.  Some of the commonest words in the  language arrived in a similarly  inexplicable way (e.g. jaw, askance,  tantrum, conundrum, bad, big,  donkey, kick, slum, log, dodge, fuss,  prod, hunch, freak, bludgeon,  slang, puzzle, surf, pour, slouch, bash,  etc).



I think there is some thinking that the word: 'dog' is somehow linked to: fr*og*, h*og*, st*ag*, p*ig*, earw*ig*. Also throw in: sh*ag*(bird)?, m*ogg*y/m*ogg*ie(mouse/cat) and: Kell*ogg*(lastname)?

Maybe  something about waggling or wiggling and animals being seen as tame rather than wild(?) guess hogs have wiggly tails  (but so do lots of other things). Don't know whats waggly/wiggly about  five years old he-deers aka stags(?)


----------



## yezik

Russian proverb - Ne mytiem, tak katatiem.
Everybody is mistaken with a real sens of this priverb. Means- you pay tax or we cut your head-
But - Kat in ols russian  executor, boureau(french), modern word is Palach, Palash is a big ake, Plash -Ploskiy. Mytar - was taxman , today - other word.
Compare Kat and Cut(Eng.) , Kutsiy- korotkiy"-  courte(french) or Short (engl.). 
Literaly -To 'skate' a head... Or to make you shorter...


----------



## luitzen

When I look up dog on Wiktionary, I see that there definitely is an etymology for the word. The problem is that it stops earlier than for other words or than we like to, but in the end, the etymology of all words stops somewhere. We may be able to trace things down to PIE roots, but even then we will never know whether they are made up or not (and in the end, most of them kinda need to be).

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dog


----------

