Oniw17 said:
Hyphenations, conations, and slang enrich the English language.
Conations? Where did you find that rather obscure word? It's not often used today. I haven't found it used in reference to language, although "desire, volition and striving" obviously affect language.
As for hyphenation, English has a rich compounding facility compared to most other languages. The typical evolution of a neologism is for two words to be used together and written with a space between them (bird house), then to be hyphenated (bird-house) and finally joined (birdhouse). Highly inflected languages like the Romance tongues have a built-in barrier to compounding because it goes against the speakers' established thought patterns to omit inflections and/or prepositions. Spanish speakers say
casa de perro, so they would never form
perro-casa or
perrocasa. It's a little easier for the Germans, but they still can't stop themselves from retaining the inflected endings of the original words, so their compounds tend to have twice as many syllables as ours.
Chinese completely lacks inflections, so compounding is rampant, far more than in English. This is handy. Since the phonetics of Chinese are so different from most other languages, it's almost impossible for them to borrow foreign words, so they have no choice but to make up their own. They often
copy ours:
shi (stone) +
you (oil) =
shi-you (petroleum), exactly the way we borrowed the Latin words for stone and oil, except we ended up with four syllables instead of two.
Throughout its history English has not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words.
We were set on this course after the Norman Invasion in 1066, when French became the official language of Angle Land. French words from government, the church, business and other domains found their way into English as the common folk were forced to become used to them in their daily lives. Ultimately the francophone leaders adopted English and assimilated into the occupied population (not an uncommon phenomenon) and brought with them some everyday words like color, face, question, second and use.
The haphazard mixing of the two languages accelerated a trend that had already begun: the simplification of English grammar. We lost most of our inflections (only a few remain such as -s, -d, -ing, -er). This streamlining made the language more efficient at compounding, since we didn't have to carry all of those extra syllables with us.
Yes, if those new forms describe new things, relationships or phenomena. No, if the new forms are invented to obfuscate, denigrate, inflame or defraud.
We don't get to control that. People need words that express strong feelings, even negative ones. As for obfuscation (from Latin
obfuscare, "darken"), words that are created for the precise discussion of things that are peculiar to a profession, sport, etc., and for which the general population have no need, are called "jargon." Words that are created in order to make a discussion incomprehensible to the general population are called "cant." The most well-known cant is Ig-pay Atin-lay, and of course since we all know it, it doesn't really work.
Since the technology of printing sparked a revolution in education resulting in near-universal literacy, a new method of word creation has arisen: the acronym. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation became LASER and then laser. In laymen's language the words "acronym" and "abbreviation" have been muddled, but the difference is that when an abbreviation is read aloud it is pronounced as the names of the letters: IRS is read Eye Are Ess, not "erz." As I've noted before, in English USA is an abbreviation, but the Hungarians treat it as an acronym and pronounce it OO-sha.
It's important to recognize the role of technology in the development of language. People who enjoy assuming that "fuck" is an acronym for "for unlawful carnal knowledge" are ignorant of the fact that when that phrase was in use most people could not read and would not have understood the joke.
I'm convinced that some words arise as the result of multiple forces converging. "Okay" or "OK" has been traced to borrowings from several different languages including Scots Gaelic and African and Native American tongues, as well as two different abbreviations, in one of which the O is actually a zero.
