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Alas these are mostly neologisms created by combining roots from classical languages. That's a recipe for creating new "obscure" words pretty much on demand.
by pg 16y ago
Alas these are mostly neologisms created by combining roots from classical languages. That's a recipe for creating new "obscure" words pretty much on demand. The best sort of obscure words are ones that are obscure because they're old or highly specialized, not because someone made them up and they never really became part of the spoken language.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- gruseom 16y agoExtraordinarily, the Slavic languages are chock full of calques that originated in just this way. Educated Slavs in the 17th-18th centuries deliberately modernized their own languages by taking Western words, translating the morphemes individually, and grafting them back together. Modern Czech in particular, if I remember correctly, was largely constructed in this way. The classic example is German Zeitschrift (magazine) being translated zeit → čas (time) and schrift → pis (writing) to produce časopis, "timewriting". Russian has tons of words like this from French (traduire, to translate, went tra → пере (across) and duire → водить (lead) to become переводить, "to crosslead"). Normally such concocted species (like the neologisms in the OP) fail to take root and soon wither. The difference here is that these words were badly needed in daily life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque