The world of words truly is a magical place, and not only for the reason that we humans can protect ourselves, create images, entertain, court and perform so many other tasks without using any other organs than our mouths.  The magic of how we create words is just as fascinating and myriad. This applies equally well to English, one of the dullest languages in terms of morphology, as to some of the more complex languages such as Greek or Turkish.  It also applies to the wonderful ability of humans, even very young ones, to morph their own words, based on applying the rules of words they already know. A common cognitive test performed on pre-schoolers tells them there is one wug and now there are two of them. A child who has never heard of a wug will be able to determine that there are two wugs, based on his store of mental rules for forming plurals.   

How Words Are Used

Modern man has developed a word usage system and a corresponding vocabulary to serve just about any purpose, without using his hands. (Using his hands, he has also created another language-sign.) Prehistoric man had to point to danger, prey, or food sources. We have words, either spoken or written, that advise us to “Watch Out” or to buy “Steak on Sale”.  Early man’s expressive side was primarily satisfied by cave drawings or notches to indicate passage of time or number of conquests. Though of course we continue to bathe in the beauty of visual arts, we also write lyrical poetry, exciting stories and have calendars and mathematical symbols to keep track of things.   Whether early man had or felt the need for a sense of humor or pathos is not known, but the limitations of image drawing would have deprived him of our rich well of language that serves no other purpose than to entertain.

How Words Were Created

A word is a symbol of an image or an idea. In language use, we assume that the other people we communicate with recognize the same symbols for the same images or ideas.  As Shakespeare said: “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  But we have arbitrarily assigned that combination of letters to represent a flower of a particular look and fragrance.  How did this happen?  Obviously, the spoken word came before the written word.  And it is easy to understand the depiction of a bison on a cave wall: it looks like a bison. But how did our ancestors decide upon a sound that would represent a given object or concept?  These symbolisms were probably initiated by some babble sounds that were uttered while an object was being held, or an animal was being pursued.  But it is generally recognized that more definitive words must have been created (assumedly based on the babble) by the time of the arrival of Neanderthal man, who was a tool maker.  It is unlikely that tools could have been developed in the absence of a set of cognitive skills that included language.

How Different Forms of Words Happen

Once again, English is the weaker sister to many other languages in terms of derivational morphology, the creation of one word from another. German is famous for its long words in common use. (Of course, many long words exist in English for scientific and medical terminology.  In 2006, Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis succeeded electrophotomicrographically as the longest word in the English language recognized by the National Puzzlers' League.  The forty-five-letter word is the name of a special form of silicosis caused by ultra-microscopic particles of siliceous volcanic dust.)  German grammar calls for nouns to be used together to form complex nouns, whereas English can use separated or hyphenated nouns. But the richness of the English language is still evident in the prefixes and suffixes that can create new words with just the addition of a few letters. Suffixes such as –able, -ment, -ly change love to loveable, confine to confinement and cold to coldly.  Sometimes the morphology even takes over the word, as in the case of ugly.  The Middle English “ugga”, to fear, became an adjective with the addition of –ly and the original word disappeared as a verb. Interestingly, the expletive “ug” persisted in the language to portray disgust.  

How we created words, how we use them and how we change them is a fascinating realm of the human mind that continues in the present day evolution of words.