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Comment by jinushaun | Hacker News Reader

I love constructed languages.

A great example of languages evolving to new technology is "internet". Composed of "inter" (Latin), "net" (English) and "work" (English). You have a culture (English) with an external influence (Latin), that sees a grouping of connected computers and decides to compare it to a fishing net. Network describes the topology, not the function. We see that we need a society that has invented fishing nets to even describe the Internet. But a different society might've called it something else. For example, the Internet is often called a web, much like a spiderweb, which also looks like a net.

You can't just invent an alien language for a technologically-advanced society without thinking about how they got there.

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Reminds me of how in Anathem by Neal Stephenson, their word for the equivalent of the Internet is the Reticulum, which etymologically comes from Reticule. Reticule has the following fictional definition:

    Reticule
    (1) In Proto-, Old, and Middle Orth, a small bag or basket, netlike in its construction.
    (2) In early Praxic Orth, a gridlike network of lines or fine wires on an optical device.
    (3) In later Praxic and New Orth, two or more syntactic devices that are able to communicate with one another.
    The Dictionary, 4th Edition, A.R. 3000

Sense 1 and 2 above actually do correspond to English. Sense 3 is constructed by using reticule as the root instead of inter-network.

An additional important point is that all the words in the book should be considered translations, since it's on another planet. For example, if they mention a "carrot" it should be considered a similar plant on their world, not a literal Earth carrot.

(Off-topic rant alert)

...And there are people who just decide they need to (and are qualified to) make new words for new technology, and make a total botch out of it.

Case in point: Some Koreans decided to make "pure Korean" word for website. Nothing wrong with that in itself. But then they looked at "world wide web", and also looked at "homepage", and decided that "world" and "home" patched together makes perfect sense as a website.

So was invented the word nurijip, from "nuri" (an archaic word for "world") and "jip" (house). A Korean website is thus a "world-house". WTF is it supposed to mean?

Makes me twitch every time I hear it.

How much do people use that new word, instead of whatever they were using before?

Everybody around me just says "website" or "homepage", but I've seen nurijip quite frequently in news articles. I guess they're under extra pressure from know-it-all prescriptivists to keep our language "pure".

(Well, to be fair, sometimes people do coin a good new "native" word to describe new stuff. Sadly, that's not the case here.)

That's why I like to use "espertofone" for "smartphone" in Portuguese. It's a quite literal translation, but has precisely the same meaning.

And always cause people to smile when they hear it. :)

Also, nets trap fishes, webs trap flies, and the internet traps people :-)

Ha ha. Love it.

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