Chapter 12 On Single Words and Compound Words

The univocal word is considered to be the pure gold of the vocabulary, the crystal of the vocabulary, the absolute original, referring only to what people have wanted it to refer to since ancient times.These days, such words are rare.Most of the words we use are compound words, which are made up of old and used old words. The process of making up is quite like recycling waste products.Everywhere around us are discarded words, discarded in the outskirts of our minds like heaps of scrap metal. When you do come across an original word, the experience is a bit of a surprise, like seeing a picture of a friend in an old middle school yearbook in a trunk.The words are very old, and the most significant ones go back to Indo-European roots, which later became ancestors of cognates in different languages.These different languages ​​were Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and much later English. Sen means old, old (Old); spreg means speech (Speak); swem means swimming (swim); nomen is name (name); porko is a pig (pig); dent is a tooth (tooth ). Eg is me (I) and my ego (my ego), tu is you (you), me is me (me). Nek is death. Mormor is whisper (murmur). Mater, pater, bhrater and wesor are the closest relatives (father, mother, brother, sister), while nepots are nephews and nephews (nephews and nieces). Yero is a year (a year). Wopsa is a wasp (wasp), aspa is a poplar (aspen). Deru is a tree, but also something durable and true. Gno is to know (to know). Akwa is water and bhreu is boil.Using basic Indo-European, plus waving, you can travel all over the world almost as easily as New York English.

Of course, there are some original words that change meaning completely. Bhedh is the predecessor of today's bead (bead), but its original meaning is to ask or order (bid); bead originally meant prayer. Dheye means to see and see, and it becomes dhyana in Sanskrit, which means meditation, jhana in Pali, Zen in Chinese, and zen in Japanese. You might think that modern science has probably been inventing entirely new synonymous words to meet its needs, but that's not the case.Most of our vocabulary for new things is refurbished old words.The word thermodynamics, which came into use a hundred years ago, is an antique shop: Indo-European gwher, meaning heat, later became Greek thermos, and Indo-European deu, meaning to do, It became dtunesthai in Greek, which means what can be done, so there is dynamic (dynamic) [dynamic (dynamite), bonus (bonus, gift) and bonbon (bonbon) come from the same deu].A binary number (bit) in computer lingo, even though it is least ambiguous when it is made.Its components are binary (binary) and digit (finger, number), yet its origin has tangled meanings: binary comes from dwo, which means two.The word also gave birth to twig (twig), double (pair) and doubt (doubt); digit originated from deik, meaning to show or teach, and later came to English with other words, they are token (mark), paradigm ( example), ditto (ditto), and toe (toe).

Nucleic acid (from ken, later knu, adding ak) is some kind of nut paired with something sharp. Cholera virus (cholera toxin), translated by an outsider who is new to our language, may be a pair of bright bows and arrows. Ghel originally meant bright, and later meant yellow; it became ghola and khole in Greek, meaning bile, and later became choler (biliary disease) and cholera (cholera) in English. Toxin was originally tekw, meaning to run or escape, and later became toxsa in Persian and toxon in Greek, meaning bow and arrow; the meaning of virus probably comes from the poison applied to the arrow, or, as Robert Grave According to Robert Graves, it comes from the yew tree taxus, whose wood makes the best arrows and whose berries have long been considered poisonous.

The word referring to poison (poison) has a more devious origin, rather like a long-delayed change.It comes from poi, meaning to drink, which later became potare in Latin, from which potion (a dose of anesthetic) [and symposium (seminar), from sun, meaning together, plus posis, meaning to drink] .The poisonous connotation arose with the idea of ​​the love potion, after which the idea of ​​poison came into consciousness. Behind venom (poison, venom), there is a similarly bizarre history.The word begins wen, meaning hope or will, leading more or less directly to win (to win).On the way of evolution, one of its branches leads to venus (sexual love), venery (sexual desire) and venerate (respect), which are all varieties of love.The love potion was called venin, and somehow the word came to mean poison or venom as it does today.

No one can explain why poison and venom can come from love potions.Perhaps, pharmacology at that time was still very primitive and mysterious, and there was only a layer of window paper between it and toxicology.Or, at the time, there was a common sense consensus that any chemical additive designed to induce false love was in essence some kind of poison.This reveals an important loveliness of the primitive people, who, hating false love, deprived the love-swindlers of the venom and poison, and gave back the stinger of the gnat and the fang of the snake. The concept of virus (virus) is very new to us, but the word virus is very old.Its root is weis, which means flow, which means to flow out slowly, to secrete (ooze).That word first went from Old English wase to Middle English wose, and then became ooze itself.Later, it derived a meaning, referring to something curved and slippery, from which weasel got its name.The subsequent associations are even more unpleasant, meaning something nasty, unhygienic, and poisonous (noxious), resulting in the virulence (toxicity) of viruses (toxin, poison).As it happens, noxious comes from nek, meaning death, from the Latin necare and nocere, words that give us necropsy and its cognates.Nectar is the drink of the gods because it prevents death (tar means overcome).

This sounds like a series of accidents, and perhaps the evolution of language is largely a matter of chance, like the evolution of animals.Although many of the facts contained in this story have been sealed by two hundred years of groping linguistics, there is something pervasive, inescapable, and highly miraculous about the whole business.If this is how words evolve, then the evolution seems to have depended on a lot of sheer luck, or, as the French say, hazard (Old French, dice; English, chance, accident, danger, risk, throw dice gambling). Chance, now finally has a word for it.Partridge gave it nearly two columns, minimal typography, but not just under this one entry.If you want to find chance, you have to find cadence, which is the closest to a synonymous word, but it is still far away from a synonymous word. Cadence comes from kad, which means to fall, to fall (to fall, falling). Kad led to Latin cadere and Sanskrit cad, still to fall, sometimes to die, and from here came a string of words meaning adventure and temporary: cadaver (cadaver for dissection), decay ( rot), casualty (accident, casualty), deciduous (falling off, temporary) and casuistry (causualty).

The concept of falling gave rise to words such as cadence (beat), cadenza (cadenza, stop) and cascade (waterfall). The word Chance, as you may have guessed, comes from the falling of the dice. As it happens, hazard also comes from dice, via Old French hazard and Spanish azar (from Arabic yasara, meaning a game of dice). Dice gets its name from the dice (die) used in the game. The word Die comes from the Indo-European word do, which originally meant to give, and later became donation (donation), dowry (dowry), endow (donation), dose (dose) and antidote (antidote).In vulgar Latin, the verb dare later meant game, giving birth to a game tool datum, which in Old English was dee, and later became die and dice.

Obviously, such things cannot be done intentionally by the human mind.Today's language is the result of an endless series of small errors.One by one, these small mistakes lead us back to the past of endless time.These words are just let out by us to fly in that darkness, to collide with each other, to pair up in haphazard ways, to produce wild breeds, to produce random bastards (blends) against which reason can do nothing. Just imagine how well we would do it if we put our minds to it.What is needed here is better, more conscious organization, and more effective administrative control over human speech.What has been missing is management.So it seems, sometimes sadly, that if most of today's words were created through this incredible process of hybridization, then hybridization is what we now want to control.What we need to learn is how to pair one word with another so that mating can occur and then select the litter we want.Governments are going to need to get involved, because we're going to need whole new research institutions around the globe, taking up huge grounds in capitals, specializing in vocabulary farming, like those agricultural experiment stations of the last century.Word breeding can become a preoccupation of future bureaucracies, as in the past, only better organized and with more committees than before.Given the in-house creativity of a stockpile of new birth words, changing alphabetic input to digital input where feasible, financially optimized by computer empowered capabilities, hitting the nail on the head, targeting goals, and prioritizing, we will eventually Get rid of dependence on the past.New bastards, hybrids synthesized in our local agencies, will in time replace those Indo-European words with all their primitiveness, preculturality, and embarrassing resonance.

First, we should replace the word hybrid with another word.It's not that it doesn't describe itself satisfactorily, but that it's a little too indirect for the scientific task we're asking it to do. Hybrid is a newer word, and it's easy to get dismissed without emotion.Behind it, however, stands a stern-faced Latin word hybrida, referring to the undesirable offspring of a wild boar and a domestic sow.The word was useless in English until about the 17th century, when a bastard was casually mentioned, referring to an improper mating of wild and domestic pigs.But it didn't really enter the English language until the middle of the 19th century.At that time, both botany and zoology needed the word.The rapidly developing linguistics also needs it, and even political science uses it (as in mixed acts in Congress).

The trouble with the term hybrid is some of its more distant origins.That word carries an inner accusation.Before it was hybrid, it was hubris, an early Greek word for blasphemy, arrogance to the gods. Hubris itself comes from two Indo-European roots, ud, meaning up or out, and gwer, meaning violence and strength.The overall meaning is insulting. Hubris became a neutral word in English at the end of the 19th century. It was excavated by scholars at Oxford and Cambridge University and used locally as a slang term to describe intentionally using a person's high intelligence to ask for trouble. Hubris (arrogance) is a danger of falling into a kind of academic judo; if you pull out all the tricks and be smart, you'll be thrown by your own power to the brink of hell.

The latest hybrid to pour into the botanists' and zoologists' productions is a combination of mammalian and bacterial cell nucleic acids that can be made as easily as beads on a string by the new technology of recombinant DNA.Some would like to stop the production of these hybrids on the grounds that the biological properties of such beings could be harmful. Make it your own language?Rely on some committees in the institute?What are you talking about.