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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

Why does every word in English have to come from somewhere else. New words are invented all the time, duh, noob.

New words are invented all the time, but girl, boy, dog you'd expect to be ancient concepts with ancient etymologies. 'noob' has an obvious etymology in new-neue-niwe. The idea that 'dog' doesn't blows my mind - especially since the guttural, monosyllabic utterances are often the oldest.

While not as recent, the Germanic "ship" / "Schiff" / etc. has no cognate in any other Indo-European language and no obvious origin in PIE, so it is conjectured it might be derived from a pre-IE indigenous European language.

It is much rarer for a word to be created out of whole cloth. Most words come from modifying or combining existing words. Even when people try to create new words, they often use an existing word as the basis to give it some additional meaning.

They don't have to - but a large portion of them are ~%80.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/borrowed-words/

They don't _have_ to, but it's an observed fact that they mostly _did_. There are vanishingly few examples of purely new coinages outside of scientific terms before the modern era.

The reason why is mostly a bootstrapping problem. The purpose of words is communication, and it's a lot easier to adapt an existing word to a new purpose that it is to just invent some new pattern of sounds and convince people to start using it. It's easier now with mass media, but prior to that, nearly impossible.

Even new words tend to have clear etymologies. Laser was LASER, for example - an acronym became a word in itself. Many scientific terms are just from Latin or Greek, which makes sense in the context of European science - languages that all scientists, regardless of where they were in Europe, would have at least some familiarity with, making it easier to translate and recognize across vernacular languages. I understand very little French, but “50 millimetre” doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out.

Another area where words are created is in product names. They can be created purely synthetically but even those often still use existing words as the basis for the creation.

For every "Zyrtec" (which still plays on "tech") you have "Claritin" ("clear/clarity") and others.

Yeah that's why I qualified it as before the modern era. There's all kinds of brand names that are just nonsense words.

Noob < newbie < newborn < Germanic new + Germanic born.

It's hard to find a word that is a truly original coinage not based on any existing words.

Sometimes a word is used for a new purpose unrelated to its origin.

I’m thinking of things like “a parliament of owls” or “a murder of crows”.

Words are generally used for communication, and, as opposed to technical inventions, it takes multiple people to evangelize a word.

Sounds plausiblel. Don't know why you're downvoted, frequently used ones are more prone to it I'd say, just because the possibility that someone thinks of or stumbles upon a new name for it is higher. Maybe Dog was the name of someones Hound and his/her family started naming so, and then a village, county , dutchy , country because it was short and convenient

I think they have been downvoted because they’ve suggested a solution which is, while plausible, not very interesting, and done so in a tone that could be read as somewhat aggressive. Also, which we could not hope to have evidence for (except in an absence of evidence for any other theory).

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