In linguistics, a protologism is a newly used or coined word, a nonce word, that has been repeated but has not gained acceptance beyond its original users or been published independently of the coiners. [1] [2] The word may be proposed, may be extremely new, or may be established only within a very limited group of people. [3] [4]
A protologism becomes a neologism as soon as it appears in published press, on a website, or in a book, independently of the coiner [5] —though, most definitively, in a dictionary. [6] A word whose developmental stage is between that of a protologism (freshly coined) and a neologism (a new word) is a prelogism. [7]
Protologisms constitute one stage in the development of neologisms. A protologism is coined to fill a gap in the language, with the hope of its becoming an accepted word. [8] [9] As an example, when the word protologism itself was coined—in 2003 [10] by the American literary theorist Mikhail Epstein—it was autological: an example of the thing it describes. [11]
About the concept and his name for it, Epstein wrote:
I suggest calling such brand new words 'protologisms' (from Greek protos, meaning 'first, original' and Greek logos, meaning 'word'; cf. prototype, protoplasm). The protologism is a freshly minted word not yet widely accepted. It is a verbal prototype, which may eventually be adopted for public service or remain a whim of linguo-poetic imagination. [12]
According to Epstein, every word in use started out as a protologism, subsequently became a neologism, and then gradually grew to be part of the language. [12]
There is no fixed rule determining when a protologism becomes a stable neologism, [13] and according to Kerry Maxwell, author of Brave New Words:
[A] protologism is unlikely to make the leap to neologism status unless society connects with the word or identifies a genuine need for it [...] there's no guarantee that simple exposure to these creations will be effective in getting them used, as discovered by British inventor Sir James Dyson when he fruitlessly attempted to promote a verb dyson (by analogy with hoover) in the early 2000s. [14]
It has been suggested protologisms are needed in scientific fields, particularly in the life sciences, where very complex interactions between partially understood components produce higher order phenomena. [15] Nevertheless, until the unappreciated concept in question has been thoroughly investigated and shown to be a real phenomenon, it is improbable that the term would be used by anyone other than its creator [15] and achieve the status of neologism.
A definition is a statement of the meaning of a term. Definitions can be classified into two large categories: intensional definitions, and extensional definitions. Another important category of definitions is the class of ostensive definitions, which convey the meaning of a term by pointing out examples. A term may have many different senses and multiple meanings, and thus require multiple definitions.
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν, neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior, sometimes similar morphological behavior in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner.
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be replaced by another in a sentence without changing its meaning.
In linguistics, a neologism is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered a neologism once it is published in a dictionary.
A pseudo-anglicism is a word in another language that is formed from English elements and may appear to be English, but that does not exist as an English word with the same meaning.
A vocabulary is a set of words, typically the set in a language or the set known to an individual. The word vocabulary originated from the Latin vocabulum, meaning "a word, name". It forms an essential component of language and communication, helping convey thoughts, ideas, emotions, and information. Vocabulary can be oral, written, or signed and can be categorized into two main types: active vocabulary and passive vocabulary. An individual's vocabulary continually evolves through various methods, including direct instruction, independent reading, and natural language exposure, but it can also shrink due to forgetting, trauma, or disease. Furthermore, vocabulary is a significant focus of study across various disciplines, like linguistics, education, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Vocabulary is not limited to single words; it also encompasses multi-word units known as collocations, idioms, and other types of phraseology. Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is one of the largest challenges in learning a second language.
In language, an archaism is a word, a sense of a word, or a style of speech or writing that belongs to a historical epoch beyond living memory, but that has survived in a few practical settings or affairs. Lexical archaisms are single archaic words or expressions used regularly in an affair or freely; literary archaism is the survival of archaic language in a traditional literary text such as a nursery rhyme or the deliberate use of a style characteristic of an earlier age—for example, in his 1960 novel The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth writes in an 18th-century style. Archaic words or expressions may have distinctive emotional connotations—some can be humorous (forsooth), some highly formal, and some solemn. The word archaism is from the Ancient Greek: ἀρχαϊκός, archaïkós, 'old-fashioned, antiquated', ultimately ἀρχαῖος, archaîos, 'from the beginning, ancient'.
Mikhail Naumovich Epstein is a Russian-American literary scholar, essayist, and cultural theorist best known for his contributions to the study of Russian postmodernism. He is the Emeritus S. C. Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. His writings encompass Russian literature and intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, the creation of new ideas in the age of electronic media, semiotics, and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities. His works have been translated into over 26 languages.
An anglicism is a word or construction borrowed from English by another language. With the rise in Anglophone media and the global spread of British and US colonialism in the 20th century and cultures in the 21st century, many English terms have become widespread in other languages. Technology-related English words like internet and computer are prevalent across the globe, as there are no pre-existing words for them. English words are sometimes imported verbatim and sometimes adapted to the importing language in a process similar to anglicisation. In languages with non-Latin alphabets, these borrowed words can be written in the Latin alphabet anyway, resulting in a text made up of a mixture of scripts; other times they are transliterated. Transliteration of English and other foreign words into Japanese generally uses the katakana script.
In linguistics, a nonce word—also called an occasionalism—is any word (lexeme), or any sequence of sounds or letters, created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word in a given language. Nonce words have a variety of functions and are most commonly used for humor, poetry, children's literature, linguistic experiments, psychological studies, and medical diagnoses, or they arise by accident.
In linguistics, conversion, also called zero derivation or null derivation, is a kind of word formation involving the creation of a word from an existing word without any change in form, which is to say, derivation using only zero. For example, the noun green in golf is derived ultimately from the adjective green.
An autological word expresses a property that it also possesses. For example, the word "word" is a word, the word "English" is (in) English, the word "writable" is writable, and the word "pentasyllabic" has five syllables.
Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is the incorporation of a word into one language from another, often creating a neologism, where the word's non-native quality is hidden by replacing it with phonetically and semantically similar words or roots from the adopting language. Thus the approximate sound and meaning of the original expression in the source language are preserved, though the new expression in the target language may sound native.
A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of vocable: utterable but meaningless.
In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau—is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together. English examples include smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, as well as motel, from motor (motorist) and hotel.
A ghost word is a word published in a dictionary or similarly authoritative reference work even though it had not previously had any meaning or been used intentionally. A ghost word generally originates from readers interpreting a typographical or linguistic error as a word they are not familiar with, and then publishing that word elsewhere under the misconception that it is an established part of the language.
Johannes Aavik was an Estonian linguist and innovator of the Estonian language.
In linguistics, specifically the sub-field of lexical semantics, the concept of lexical innovation includes the use of neologism or new meanings in order to introduce new terms into a language's lexicon. Most commonly, this is found in technical disciplines where new concepts require names, which often takes the form of jargon. For example, in the subjects of sociology or philosophy, there is an increased technicalization in terminology in the English language for different concepts over time. Many novel terms or meanings in a language are created as a result of translation from a source language, in which certain concepts were first introduced.
protologism.
