Old words — the origins of the words
Where do new words come from? Do people just make them up using random sounds? Surprisingly, no! Most of them are thousands of years old, but evolving: they changed the way they sound, their meaning, their form, but in a constant evolution. For new meanings, people made up new meanings for old words, often using suffixes and prefixes.
Modern technology is described using words that are perhaps more than 3000 years old: an antenna is a “sailyard”, a monitor is a “reminder”, a computer is a “thinker” and so on. The words for “wheel” and “car” are derived from the words which our ancestors used thousands of years ago when they just acquired the new technology from Mesopotamia.
Most of the words used nowadays to describe technology are from Latin and Greek,
the languages which were for a long time the lingua franca, that is, the standard language used in the sciences. So, don’t be surprised when your Digital Versatile Disc is derived completely from Latin and Greek.
September 18th, 2008 at 5:48 am
Hi
You shoud be the journalist with your nice talent