The Origin of New Words

Sometimes I think about how languages change dramatically over the years. I guess that comes from not having much of a life. Consider, my high school German students could more easily decipher Middle German, spoken around 1200, than they could English spoken around 1000. And languages change fairly rapidly. The average person today could not read Old English, but would not find the English of 100 or so years later to be that difficult. In the span of history, that isn’t a very long time, two or three generations. If Old English had been spoken, say in 1909, we would have known people in our younger days who still spoke it. Pretty amazing, I would say, particularly when it just didn’t happen in one tiny village but all over the place. Most European languages that I am familiar with have made dramatic sound shifts at one time or another. German made one around 900AD. Look at the difference between the Spanish and Italian spoken today and the Latin that was its common tongue. The latter did not even have the definite article (“the”) The Germanic languages spoken by the Gothic tribes that invaded the areas during the collapse of the Roman Empire did, however. Perhaps that’s where it came from.
And then languages change on a personal family level. For example, since my oldest daughter Heather was born, the word “banana” has been replaced in our family language by “balana.” Breakfast has become “greface.” Rhododendrons have been replaced with “Road from Denvers.” My second daughter, Laura, interested in sports, introduced us to “lympics” and “nastics” for Olympics and gymnastics. To “train” for her coming Olympic, gymnastic career, she wore “norts” and “lockies,” or shorts and long socks. Even the beloved Red Sox have come into our speech as “The Lockies.” Since we are not important people, these will never make it into the common tongue, although I did hear my brother-in-law ask my sister for a “balana” the other day. If we were royalty maybe in 100 years, people would eat their greface under a Road from Denver.