Blank Words Project
A method of generating blank words so that people can assign concepts and definitions to them. Some concepts, ideas, or definitions don’t have a word in any language that can be used in our own language. Some concepts, ideas, or definitions do exist with a word in another language that we can use, but are difficult to say.
Ideas Without Labels
Someone wanted to have some words for some particular emotions and feelings and started creating them and made a dictionary for them. One of the most popular of those words is ‘sonder’.
Sonder – Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkoML0_FiV4]
Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows channel [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDetdM5XDZD1xrQHDPgEg5w]
Ideas with Difficult to Spell and Speak Labels [loanwords]
When we take words from other languages that have useful ideas that are attached to them, those are called loanwords. Some loanwords are difficult to say, some are not. So when those loanwords fit our way of pronunciations and aren’t difficult to spell, we tend to use them a lot in writing or conversation. When they are difficult to spell or pronounce, we don’t use them so much in writing or conversation.
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word adopted from one language (the donor language) and incorporated into another language without translation. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because they share an etymological origin, and calques, which involve translation. – Wikipedia
Examples of difficult to spell and pronounce loanwords:
- schadenfreude – pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.
- L’appel du Vide – the call of the void
More on those terms:
- Check Your Schadenfreude – Nerdwriter [https://youtu.be/Tva0xq-eDvI]
- What Is That? – Call Of The Void (L’appel du vide) – WIT Thinks [https://youtu.be/iO-0yn_vHzI]
How are words, the labels for ideas, normally created? This is a difficult topic because it seems that most resources available on this operate on the idea of modifying words that already exist in a number of ways. Some, but not all of the ways are; derivation, compounds, conversion, clipping, blend, back-formation. However not a lot of people will talk about how to make a word from scratch. There is one community who does do that, but they make entirely new languages. A sub-reddit on reddit that is all about this is /r/conlangs. Their wiki may be of interest to someone, so I’m linking it here.
How Are New Words Created? – Geeky Linguist [https://youtu.be/ph4XqqNP1F4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_formation
Zipfs Law – VSAUCE [https://youtu.be/fCn8zs912OE]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
Something similar to Zipf’s Law is the Pareto Principle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
The Language Sounds That Could Exist, But Don’t – Tom Scott [https://youtu.be/9uZam0ubq-Y]