Where do words come from?

Fork is based on the Latin word “furca” meaning forked stick.

It’s a very complex story to share in such a small space, but the best book I’ve read on the subject is The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue (by Merritt Ruhlen). There’s compelling evidence to suggest that all of the languages that exist nowadays can be traced (at least in part) to one original language spoken a long, long time ago.

(I wonder that about a lot of words, actually. I mean, who came up with “squirrel?”)

Scallywag, Right, Wrong, God, Paisly, Sluice, Chipmunk, It

What makes me excited about language is the fact that it’s fluid. That if we felt like it, we the fluther could invent a new word ourselves. I think that we should. What should it mean?

@zephyr826 me and my friends play that game all the time, we don’t invent a new word exactly, but we say things like “a word that would mean the ability to jump directly from the first to the third floor” and another friend would say “I think it starts with “D”” and eventually we came to the conclusion that to jump from the first to the third floor is to “dipstick up”. Why? Why not?

@adreamofautumn of course it’s to dipstick up. Let’s make it happen. I challenge all of fluther to use the expression in casual conversation at least 5 times in March. This is how revolutions are started. Who’s with me!?

@btko But, it could be arguable, where did the word “Furca” come from? Someone just made it up, told a bunch of people, and it caught on. Otherwise, we could technically convince anyone that a dog is a pickle, it would still be the same thing. Words are only words because someone said so. Just like math only works like it does because someone says so. Everything in this world is a lie, and anything can be changed. Nothing is real, nothing is permanent. In 100 years, a pickle could now be called a jellyfish. It’s all a matter of opinion. If I decided that a dog was a pickle, in my mind, that dog is a pickle. It’s just that way in everyone’s mind. That’s just the way society works, if the majority of people think that, that’s what you think too. Anything can really be true. I could say 2+4=835. And it could technically be right, if someone else didn’t say it wasn’t. If everyone agreed, it would be true. That’s the way I feel on this issue.

@mangeons – I agree with part of what you say. It’s true that if society agrees that a dog is a pickle, a dog becomes a pickle. That said, many of the basic words have stayed in a similar form for a very long, long time. It’s easy to make up new words that people adopt for a while as a trend, but it’s hard to convince a culture to give up basic, useful everyday words.

@mangeons…“Just like math only works like it does because someone says so.”

That is the third most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life.

the more i look at it the more i’m considering retiring number two

@Blondesjon How is it ridiculous? It’s true. Where else would it have come from? Anything society accepts as true, is true. Someone had to make it up. If someone originally had said 4+19=1025, then it would be true today.

Only for values of 1025 that equal 23.

Numbers, like words, only mean their value because that’s what someone said. If they had said ♥=34, then we would use ♥ instead of 34 in math. It’s all relative.

However, the society that used ♥ for 34 would point at a pile of 34 rocks and call it ♥ many. The symbol used to represent the value of 34 might be different, but it still represents 34 (or XXXIV) things.

Exactly. But it’s not the same. If someone decided that equations didn’t work the way they did, then it would be different. It’s still not 34, it’s ♥ now.

@mangeons…You still have the same rocks.

But the relative terms for things (words, numbers) could technically be changed and still be true, which was my original statement. Yes, everything is the same, but the terms can be changed.

Words are just symbols, it’s true. However, they’re symbols with remarkable sticking power, in many cases.

If you decided to call a dog a pickle, to you, a dog would be a pickle. But since the primary reason for language is communication with other people, it is practically necessary to have other people think that the symbol means the same thing that you think it means. Otherwise, a dog isn’t a pickle – and people look at you like you’re crazy.

But they’re not really true are they? Is anything really true? A lot of things are relative and could be changed. Maybe I don’t have red hair, I have blue. It’s all psychological, all in our heads.

@mangeons…“Just like math only works like it does beacuse someone says so.”

I believe there’s objective fact. I believe (to beat a cliché to death) that “the earth is remarkably spherical” is a more true statement than “the earth is flat,” and thinking will not make it otherwise.

@Blondesjon And?

Unless, they could call spherical flat, and it could still be true, right? Remember the dog/pickle scenario? ; )

Still wouldn’t change the (objective) actual shape of the earth – just the subjective symbol-word for the thing we know as “spherical.” In other words, you still have the same rocks.

Like the ones in his head.

but by rocks i mean brains…

Laureth, in my opinion, has it pretty much right. Words are symbols. Think about what the problem we face is. We preceive things outside of us. Different shapes, different sounds or smells, different activities. At some point way back in prehistory, we achieve the ability to conceive of these things. I.e., to think.

The chair is not in our minds. It is out there. So what is in our minds? The idea of the chair. Now, we want to communicate our ideas. How do we do it? We need mutually agreed upon symbols for the chair. What form will our symbols take? We have many options. We could use smells (if we could control them well); we could use touch; we could use sound; and we could use sight.

The first symbols for our ideas (which represent things we perceive) were sounds. The sounds used are utterly arbitrary. You can see that there are (or were) thousands of languages, and in most of them, there was a word for chair, and some of those words for chair sounded completely different from any of the others.

Later on, we wanted to communicate to people over time, and to store our ideas for later retrieval. To do this, written symbols were developed. Languages developed their own symbols to create symbols of sounds (which are symbols of ideas, which are symbols of things we perceive).

Again, writing systems are arbitrary. Some systems have one symbol for every word. Others use an alphabet that is combined in different ways to represent words. Sometimes it is not obvious how to tell what a word sounds like from the way a word is symbolized. Phonetic alphabets are more useful in this sense than ideogram systems (like Chinese).

Words come from some arbitrary association of sound with idea that happened far, far ago. Of course, it is still happening today. The word “iPhone” didn’t exist a decade or two ago.

Nowadays, the sound of new words tends to relate to sounds of old words. This is why it is interesting to look at the derivation of words, and trace their history back through the ages. Most of this is done by tracing word history in writing. Nowadays, with the availability of sound recording, we can trace (for a little over 100 years) the origin of sounds as well as written symbols.

Thomas Edison recorded the first words in 1877. It was recorded on a tinfoil cylinder phonograph. The recorded words were `Mary had a little lamb`. Some day, people will listen to those words to see how english was spoken over a century ago.

Remember, words aren’t really words. They are sounds that represent symbols that represent ideas that represent thing in the consensus reality. Words are provisional. It doesn’t matter what they sound like, so long as everyone can agree that the sound represents the same thing. Pickle? Dog? It’s irrelevant, as long as we agree that dog means the animal, and pickle means a cucumber, or vice versa.

Go now, and create new words!

Fluther already created a new word. Frizzer, anyone?

@augustlan: I already have one, but I guess I could take two.

I’d like a third Frizzer, please

@laureth Ruhlen’s work is very controversial. He uses a method called mass comparison, which is regarded by many historical linguists to be unsound.

@morphail – I agree that it is controversial. However, having read the book, I also agree with the conclusion.