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English Language Composition 1

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15 views

English Language Composition 1

Uploaded by

twumasisandra8
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Quite unusually, words can be formed simply by creation out of nowhere.

Genuinely

novel creations are hard to identify, however, since they usually conform to standard

phonological rules of English and so will always be suggestive of some source or other,

and many neologisms (new coinages of words) are formed from other existing

words. Literary and science fictional texts are good sources for creative neologisms,

but the origins of ‘warp-drive’, ‘raygun’, ‘flying saucer’ and ‘cyborg’ are plain or

easily deducible. More obscure neologisms might include ‘kemmer’ (Ursula Le

Guin’s invention of the reproductive period of an alien race), ‘grok’ (Robert

Heinlein’s wide-ranging term for mutual empathy), and Philip K. Dick’s very useful

‘kipple’ (the bits and pieces of detritus that accumulate and multiply over time in

drawers and cupboards).

Of course, all the various types and combinations of word-formation can be extended

by grammatical inflection as well. So the verb ‘to grok’ can be inflected to produce

‘I grok’, ‘she groks’, ‘we grokked’, ‘they are grokking’, and the noun ‘raygun’ can be

inflected as ‘two rayguns’, as well as expanded by derivation as in ‘the raygunner’,

‘raygunnery’, ‘anti-raygun’, and so on.

Over the course of the development of English, most new words in the language

have been free morphemes borrowed from other languages or adapted from existing

words as set out above. Innovation in new grammatically bound morphemes is very

rare: the Old English third-person verb-ending ‘-e2’ lasted into Middle English

(spelled as ‘-eth’, as in ‘my cup runneth over’), but the northern dialectal ‘-s’ ending

eventually replaced it (‘runs over’). There have to be very powerful, long-lasting and

widespread forces to sustain a new grammatical morpheme. For example, the pro-

noun ‘it’ (from Old English ‘hit’) was originally a useful option between ‘he’ and ‘she’

(originally ‘he’ and ‘heo/seo’ in Old English), but today ‘it’ has a sense of inanimacy.

It would be very useful in modern English to have a less clumsy neutral option other

than ‘he or she’ or the written ‘s/he’ or the increasingly common but odd non-

agreement of ‘they’ in a sentence like, ‘when the reader gets to this point, they will

have finished the unit’. Perhaps you might try to invent or import a useful alternative
pronoun?

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