A. Suppose I want to say now 'dish' to you,
Shall I say 'dish,' or shall I rather say,
A hollow-bodied vessel, made of earth,
Form'd by the potter's wheel in rapid swing,
Baked in another mansion of its mother,
Which holds within its net the tender milk-fed
Offspring of new-born flocks untimely choked?
B. By Hercules, you'll kill me straight if you
Do not in plain words say a 'dish of meat.'
A.' Tis well. And shall I speak to you of drops
Flowing from bleating goats, and well compounded
With streams proceeding from the yellow bee,
Sitting on a broad receptacle provided
By the chaste virgin born of holy Ceres,
And now luxuriating beneath a host
Of countless finely-wrought integuments;
Or shall I say 'a cheesecake?'
B. Prithee say
A cheesecake.
A. Shall I speak of rosy sweat
From Bacchic spring?
B. I'd rather you'd say wine.
A. Or shall I speak of dusky dewy drops?
B. No such long paraphrase,—say plainly, water.
A. Or shall I praise the cassia-breathing fragrance
That scents the air
B. No, call it myrrh,—forbear
Those sad long-winded sentences, those long
And roundabout periphrases; it seems
To me by far too great a labour thus
To dwell on matters which are small themselves,
And only great in such immense descriptions[1] (sic; Athenaeus-of-Naucratis 1854).
The term poetry and its cognates poet, poem, etc. as well as the related Greek terms poiēsis, poiētēs, poiēma, etc., derive all from the Greek verb ποιέω (poieō), to make, create, the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before. Today poetry is perceived as a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language – such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and meter – to evoke meanings in addition to the prosaic, ostensible purpose. Poetry uses differential interpretation to words or evoke emotional responses, the terms saying more than themselves by their choice (meaning and sounds) and their arrangement (rhythms, metrics, figures of style). Poetry is considered oral and musical from its origins since the search for particular rhythms, such as verses, and sound effects, such as rhymes, had a mnemonic function for primitive oral transmission. This invoice specific to the poetic text makes it suitable to be heard rather than addressed by the silent reading. Assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and rhythm achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poetic diction using ambiguity, irony, symbolism, and other stylistic elements often allows multiple interpretations of a text. Similarly, metaphor, simile, and metonymy create associations between otherwise disparate images – a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred depth forms may exist between individual verses in rhyme or rhythm patterns.
The creation of new words, properly called word formation in linguistics, is a defining role of a poet. However, this aspect is not in the definition of the term poetry I have come across. The most frequent mechanisms of word formation known today involve pre-existing linguistic material. A morphological derivation forms a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix. A derivation is different from an inflexion, which is the modification of a word to form different grammatical categories without changing its core meaning, like determines, determining, and determined derive from the root determine
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme – i.e., a word or sign – made of more than one stem. Compounding, composition, or nominal composition is a method of word formation that creates compound lexemes. In more familiar terms, compounding occurs when we join two or more words or signs to make a longer one. A compound word may have a similar or different meaning compared to the sum of the definitions of its components in isolation. The component stems of a compound word may be of the same part of speech or belong to different grammatical classes. For example, the word footpath is composed of two nouns, foot + path, whereas blackbird consists of an adjective (black) and a noun (bird). Compounding also occurs readily in other Germanic languages. Concatenated words can mean the same as the sum of constituent parts – e.g., German Pressekonferenz, for a press conference – or a different thing where, e.g., an adjective joins a noun like Danish hvidvinsglas, for white-wine glass. Some languages readily form compounds from what would be a multi-word expression in other languages. This agglutination can result in unusually long words, known in German as Bandwurmwörter or tapeworm words.
Agglutinative languages create very long words, frequently with derivational morphemes. We find incredibly extendable compound words in the vocabulary of chemical compounds, where, in biochemistry and polymer chemistry, they can be practically unlimited in length. Germans can just omit the spaces from entire sentences. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the longest published German word has 79 letters:
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft
which means 'Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Electricity Maintenance Building of the Danube Steam Shipping,' but there is no evidence that this association ever existed. Sanskrit, Turkish, Georgian, and many other languages have similar capabilities. However, the longest published word in world literature according to the Guinness Book of Records 1990
λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιοτυρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτεκεφαλλιοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών[2]
This word with 169 Greek letters was transliterated with 181 Latin characters:
lepadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephaliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon[3]
This is the name of a fricassee-like dish with at least 16 sweet and sour ingredients and has been translated as 'plattero-filleto-mulleto-turboto-cranio-morselo-pickleo-acido-silphio-honeyo-pouredonthe-topothe-ouzelo-throstleo-cushato-culvero-cutleto-roastingo-marowo-dippero-leveret-syrupu-gibleto-wings', following the original meter and the original way of composition (Aristophanes 1923) or, in prose, as 'oysters-saltfish-skate-shark's-heads-left-over-vinegar-dressing-laserpitium-leek-with-honey-sauce-thrush-blackbird-pigeon-dove-roast-cock's-brains-wagtail-cushat-hare-stewed-in-new-wine-gristle-of-veal-pullet's-wings' (Strauss 1966). This word, coined by Aristophanes in his comedy Ecclesiazusae, known as Women in Power or Assembly Women, first staged in Athens in the year 393 BC, appears in dictionaries[4]; actors have to pronounce it every time they perform the play. Greek has unlimited capabilities for compound word formation. In Greek, compounding is usually done by modifying the joined syllables rather than a straightforward concatenation of stems. Thus, compounding involves removal, addition, or contraction of letters at the splicing site with notable phonetic effects; hence the frequent appearance of an O between stems in Aristophanes' cuisine term:
λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιοκαραβομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοκεφαλλιοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερύγων
Nevertheless, morphological derivation and compounding are far from the centre of interest of the analysis herein, which is instead concerned with the de novo formation of simple stems. Still, letter modification attributable to stem compounding may account for some awkward variation observed at the beginning or end of stems. Perhaps more interesting are the following mechanisms of word formation.
A calque is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word, or root-for-root translation. A term borrowed from another language, such as cliché is from French or loot from Hindi, or borrowed and modified phonetically to appear native (a mechanism called phono-semantic matching), may create neologisms. A subcategory of calques is the semantic loan, that is, the extension of the meaning of a word to include new, foreign definitions.
The term neologism comes from the Greek νέο- (neo-, new) and λόγος (logos, word, speech, utterance). It refers to a relatively recent or isolated term, name, or phrase that may be entering everyday use but that has not yet been entirely accepted into the mainstream language
The term protologism describes a stage in the development of neologisms at which a word is just being proposed, extremely new, or not established outside a minimal group of peers. Hopefully, a protologism coined to fill a gap in the language becomes an accepted word. When created, the term protologism was autological, an example of what it describes
Neologisms appear when authors find that a specific notion lacks a name in a language, when the existing words are insufficiently detailed, or when the neologist is unaware of the current vocabulary
Words have a variety of senses and connotations which alter with time, often to the extent that synchronic and diachronic cognates have very different meanings. The boundary between word formation and semantic drift (semantic change) can be difficult to define: a new use of an old word corresponds to a new term derived from an old one and identical to it in form. The phenomenon is fundamental to this analysis. Semantic drift may be motivated, as with symbolic terms, or erroneous, when the original meaning is distorted, forgotten, or completely ignored. Thus, word usage may shift with time to the point that the modern definition differs from the original one.
Among the most common types of semantic change Bloomfield
Neologisms can get established through memetics – i.e., a debated mechanism analogous to Darwinian evolution – through mass media, the internet, and word of mouth, including academic discourse in many fields renowned for their use of distinctive jargon
Another particularly effective mechanism of word formation is called back-formation, the process of creating a new lexeme by removing actual or supposed affixes
The noun taxon derives from the word taxonomy and signifies a unit of classification, a taxonomical category or a group. The word taxonomy and the Greek cognate transliterated as taxinomēsis – meaning classification – are compounds of several stems. The same stems are found in the Greek cognate taxis (meaning order, arrangement, or class) and nomē (pasturage, division, distribution). Both taxonomy and taxinomēsis were formed by compounding from taxis and nomē in different ways, depending on the language. In English, we removed the ending morpheme -is from tax-is and replaced the Greek ending morpheme -ē from nom-ē with the English ending -y. Then, the remaining stems were joined by inserting an O in-between, as is frequently the case in Greek (see Aristophanes' example above): tax-o-nom-y. In Greek, we only removed the final -s from tax-i-s; then, we concatenated the remaining tax-i- with nom-ē and added the ending -sis, which forms nouns of action, process, or condition: tax-i-nom-ē-sis.
The above is the first example of how units of meaning (sememes) carried by single letters or small combinations of 2-3 letters can be recombined to produce new concepts. The mechanism is analogous to the biological processes of genetic recombination (for DNA) and splicing (for RNA), all of which involve deletion, insertion, trimming, extension, and ligation of letters or nucleotides. These processes, which seem non-random, will be extensively explored herein. Although the examples presented in this introductory section are recent cases of word formation with well-kept records, the odds are that the underlying mechanisms have always existed. We have morphological elements (single letters or short strings, called morphemes) that have meaning on their own and can be recycled to form other words.
In Greek, we may replace the ending -ē-sis of tax-i-nom-ē-sis with other meaningful ending morphemes to modulate the meaning of the compound string tax-i-nom-: by adding the Greek verb ending -ō we obtain the verb tax-i-nom-ō (to classify). For now, we may already keep these related questions in mind: why does the final -ō morpheme evoke action and designate a verb? Does the grapheme or the phoneme correspond to the concept of a verb or action? Was the choice of this letter arbitrary? Could Greeks use H or other terminal letters to form verbs? By replacing -ō with the adjective morpheme -ik (equivalent to English -ic), we obtain the adjective tax-i-nom-ik- (English tax-o-nom-ic-). We can further specify the gender of the adjective (in Greek) by adding the corresponding generic ending -os, -ē, or -o, to form tax-i-nom-ik-os (tax-o-nom-ic-al; masculine), tax-i-nom-ik-ē (feminine) or tax-i-nom-ik-o (neuter), respectively. Again, we may ask: can these endings be considered visual or auditory representations of genders? Could one have represented the genders with different letters (or phonemes) in Greek – knowing that genders are not represented in other languages, such as English?
Looking closer at the above letter strings, we find the substring o-nom from tax-o-nom-y in the Greek onoma, name, which is, in essence, the identifier of an individual item in a classification system. We can then use o-nom-a to make o-nom-a-t-o-poi-ia (onomatopoeia). The joining letters -t-o- may be discussed[6], but there is no doubt that the -poi- morpheme of the -poi-ia string is the same as in the verb poi-ō, meaning to make, to form, to create. It is important to remark that the English o-nom-a-t-o-poe-ia consists of stems also found in tax-o-nom-y and tax-i-nom-ē-sis; it does not contain sememes related to sound imitation. It simply means name (o-nom-a) + formation (poi-ia), i.e., the coining of a name. The addition of sound imitation to the word's definition, commonly seen in all dictionaries[7], represents a semantic shift. This shift represents the practically unquestioned view in western linguistics that language is fundamentally phonetic (see section Structural linguistics and semiotics); therefore, we only form names by imitating sounds.
We may, now, take the morpheme -nom- from o-nom-a (the assigned identification name) and stick to it the masculine ending -os to make nom-os, which means anything assigned, law, or rule. Then, add to nom-os the morpheme tax-i-, from tax-i-s (order, class) to obtain tax-i-nom-os (the assigner, the classifier). The X of tax-i-s phonetically corresponds to the digraph ks; tax-i-s is a contracted form of tak-sis, with the ending -sis forming a noun of condition (in this case, order). The stem tak- revealed this way is found in the verb tak-t-o-poi-ō, to put order (to classify), to make orderly – in the pattern o-nom-a-t-o-poi-ō, to make names. Similarly, in English, we may replace the stem tax- from tax-o-n with the stem ex- from the Greek exō (out, out of) to obtain ex-o-n, i.e., a term referring to RNA segments that are allowed to exit the cell nucleus and get expressed into protein. The mechanism that produces the terms tak-sis, tax-is, nom-ē, tax-o-n-om-y and tax-i-n-om-ē-sis, tax-o-n, tak-t-o-poi-ō, o-n-om-a, o-n-om-a-t-o-poi-ō, etc., suggests that compounding operates at the level of single letters and very short strings. This differential splicing-like mechanism recombines stems to form words, carrying over their little bit of meaning. There may be strings that hold together, others that can split further, strings that carry specific meaning, and others that give generic sememes. The higher the resolution by which we look at the structure of a word, the finer becomes its semantic definition.
Another attractive method of word formation is an abbreviation. An acronym is a word formed as a type of abbreviation built from the first parts of words of a longer content such as of a name or phrase, often with individual initial letters. For example, NATO is formed from the words North Atlantic Treaty Organization, scuba from the Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Sometimes initial syllables are used, as in the case of Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg), or a mixture of initial syllables and letters, as in radar (Radio Detection And Ranging). Sometimes the letters of the acronym need to be pronounced individually as with uses of AA (including in connection to various Automobile Associations, American Associations, and for Alcoholics Anonymous). There is no universal standard for the formation of such abbreviations or their orthographic styling. Acronyms result from a word-formation process known as blending, in which parts of two or more words combine to form a new term. An example is the English word smog, which comes from smoke and fog, or brunch, which comes from breakfast (itself a compound word; break-fast) and lunch.
I wonder if the recombined segments in the above examples are not unrecognized morphemes that carry independent meanings. This word-formation mechanism is not a general rule operating throughout our linguistic history, rather than a particular case. Acronyms are said to have flourished, especially from the 20th century onwards; the distinction between abbreviation and acronym has been steadily eroding, and the term acronym now applies to several types of abbreviations. Seldom in history did authors explicitly state the mechanism they formed their words. Likely, this is how we always made words, even at higher rates at the dawn of literature. The apparent blooming in the 20th century may be a mere consequence of information systems and improved record-keeping developments.
Concluding, word formation is not merely the use of existing words with new meanings, as most definitions of poetry state, but also making up words that nobody has ever heard or read before. The frequency with which we see new names in poetry and literature depends on the language and the author. In the Greek poems by Odysseas Elytis, we see de novo word formation all the time. For example, the words iliatoras and petropaichnidiatoras are de novo-created epithets of the sun. They would be equivalent to some English neologisms like 'sunor' and 'stoneplayor' (not stone-player), or some French' soleileur' and 'pièrrejeuneur.' They have been translated as the 'Sovereign Sun' and the 'great stone-player'
The oldest surviving poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh from the 3rd millennium B.C. in Sumer (Mesopotamia, now Iraq). It was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, on papyrus
Could it be true that those poets have created their own words as Elytis did or that they used words created out of the blue by previous storytellers? The answer here is yes. The original Homeric word ἔπος (epos) had nothing to do with heroic acts. It meant 'word,' utterance, or single word, especially regarding etymology or usage; only later was it associated with a line of writing, verse, and epic poetry[8]. This semantic drift occurred in Roman times when the Latin transliteration ĕpos came to mean a heroic poem, an epic, only[9]. The English terms epos, epic, and epic poetry, and the French epopée, as well as the equivalent Germanic and Slavic terms, besides the Greek εποποιία (epopoiia or epopoeia), inherited the later Greek and Latin semantics and are now uniquely associated with literature describing heroic acts. With ἔπος (epos) meaning word and ποιέω (poieō) glossed as to make, produce, create, bring into existence, compose, write, bring about, or render, εποποιία (epopoiia or epopoeia) can only have meant word-making, word-formation, coining of words. It has the same pattern of ὀνοματοποιία (onomatopoiia; onomatopoeia), the coining of names [in imitation of a sound]. This straightforward etymology of epic poetry suggests that the Homeric epics were word-formation exercises. The proper names were not heroes but neologisms, de novo formed words. The mythemes around them were to assist the interpretation of these previously unknown terms.
Every one of those epic words I have examined invokes physical, visual, historical, and cultural human experience. They are all written as one would have silently told them using universal facial and hand gestures. If I want to show something to a Chinese-only speaker, I will point my index to the object, and so will you, I guess, whatever language you speak. The Italians use expressive body language even when they talk with kin. Homer, Hesiod, and Solon were intensely amused by using their new alphabet software. They created new words for telling the story of humanity from its beginning to their days, a tale that Plato also attempted to explain by prose in his trilogy Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates (see section The trip to Atlantis). There is nothing superstitious, supernatural, and religious or heroic – in the modern sense of the term – in their poems to the extent that I have been able to analyze them. Could it be those naïve readers encountering words like Hesiod's Chrysaor of Elytis' 'Sunor' – while completely lacking the authors' cultural experience – gave these words some supernatural significance? My thesis is also affirmative. Religion and heroism are mere coats of serial misinterpretation covering poetic words that later readers did not understand. I will document such cases by removing the surreal coatings and reinterpreting the words in their natural, historical, and mythological context.
References
[2] Aristoph. Eccl. 1169 original text.
[3] Aristoph. Eccl. 1169 translation.
[6] The -t- probably derives from the Phoenician letter Tāw (X or +), representing the symbol + used as a conjunction between stems. The -o- is the usual insert between jointed stems, as in Aristophanes' long word.
[7] See, for example, onomatopoeia from onomatopoiía, 'the coining of a word in imitation of a sound' in the Wiktionary.
