Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Re: The gaps between languages
by
Swinging Phallus
on 16/10/2017, 23:44:24 UTC
This may be a bit tangent but I think you may find it interesting.
Lewis Caroll had a very keen sense with rendering the English language in his writing. Lewis would create words like Mimsy (Miserable + Flimsy) or Chortle (Chuckle + Snort). I think this is the sort of evolutionary step languages have in becoming what they are, we see the same thing taking place in the mobile texting realm. These play on words are powerful, so much so that Eric Laithwaite the inventor of the magnetic railway systems used them to determine measurements on fields that hadn't even existed until he made them up with the synergy of words and ideas (there's a great 1 hour or so youtube video of him lecturing to a classroom about gyroscopes, if you like physics you should definitely look it up).

I feel that originally this growth in language is very necessary for a more effective communication, but it seems that this sort of synthesized dialect is frowned upon by universities and scholarly institutes.

One big issue is that English has too many words that mean the exact same thing rather than enough words that mean something new.