It 's been said "language evolves organically", but individuals have created languages of their own, hoping to devise a universal tongue by which all cultures might communicate. This doesn't include such fads as Pig Latin and Double Dutch, which I remember as early childhood attempts at coding language so as to foil parental understanding. I have no idea how or when or where either of those got started, though both are just complex enough not to have been invented by the children who favored them.
On the other hand, we have Volapuk and Esperanto.
Volapuk (properly spelled with an umlaut over the u) was devised in 1879 by a German priest named Johann Martin Schleyer. He claimed the idea came from a vision of the Tower of Babel and a little divine inspiration.
Esperanto was introduced by L.I. Zamenhof in 1887. From it came a language called Ido (the Esperanto word for "child") and another called Interlingua.
Also in the 1800s a poet and minister, named William Barnes, attacked the English language, trying to make it "Englisher". He wondered what the English language would look like if it was stripped of all Latin and Greek "root" words. (Check your dictionary to be surprised how many there are!) Some of his substitute words, produced in his "Pure English" dictionary, made perfect sense while others produced chuckles and still others needed translating for understanding.
The substitute word for "photograph", from Greek words meaning "light" and "writing", he thought should be "sunprint". That makes sense. See what you make of some of his other substitutes.
Anniversary would become "year-day".
Affirmative would become "ayesome".
Alienate - "unfrenden".
Botany - "wortlore".
Conscience - "inwit".
Contrary - "thwartsome".
Democracy - "folkdom".
Divisible- "sundersome".
Dictionary - "word-book".
Negative - "naysome".
Opposites - "overthwartings".
Quality - "suchness".
Quantity - "muchness".
We often don't realize that many words we use are 100 years old, like the above. For example, here is a little surprising list Reader's Digest compiled that date back to 1917: advertorial, chowhound, cootie, gaga, lounge lizard, pep pill and even the abbreviation OMG!
Since then the sciences have probably coined the most new words. And the military has likewise been word-active. But the most useful general usage words have probably come from authors and writers for newspapers and magazines. Just to remind you of some you've probably forgotten the birth of Reader's Digest has come to our aid again.
"Nerd" came from Dr. Seuse in the 1950s when he named one of his oddlball creatures that in "If I Ran the Zoo". "Twitter", long before Google utilized it, came from Geoffrey Chaucer, indicating someone "carping continually". "Yahoos", likewise, did not originate with Google, but with Jonathan Swift in "Gulliver's Travels", though the term then indicated "the dregs of humankind". "Flummox" came from Charles Dickens' "Pickwick Papers" and "boredom" from his "Bleak House". John Milton coined "pandemonium" in "Paradise Lost", H.G. Wells first used "atom bomb" in his 1914 novel "The World Set Free", and Lewis Carroll invented "chortle" and "galumph" in his nonsense poem "Jabberwocky".
And new words keep coming after all this time. One I love is "tyrunt", indicating a child who bosses everyone around. A useful term in our burgeoning digital world is "fidgetal", indicating one continually fidgeting with his phone or whatever. Both are borne courtesy of Lizzie Skurnick in "That Should Be A Word".
Reddit.com offers the term "cellfie" to replace "mug shot" and "dogtor" for "veterinarian". Jennifer Braunschweiger, in a piece titled "Lessons In Beauty" in Fast Company Magazine (April 2017), came up with "incentivizing", meaning rewarding loyal customers by varied means. And Gary Hallock, who has been producing and hosting the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships for 26 years, termed competitors "punslingers".
Now, to put all the foregoing into perspective, the Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary I have used since 1996 - thus already 21 years old - encompasses 2229 pages. What is it going to look like in another 20 years?
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