4 ms·
But I'm wondering, if a word only appears one time, in a single book, how do we know it is a real word and not a new word invented by his author or a mistake?
by doe88 13y ago
But I'm wondering, if a word only appears one time, in a single book, how do we know it is a real word and not a new word invented by his author or a mistake?
- JacobAldridge 13y agoWhat, pray tell, is the difference between a real word and a new word invented?
- sp332 13y agoReminds me of an author who was given a brand-new Oxford English Dictionary (a 20-volume English dictionary with etymologies) by one of his fans. His wife was proof-reading a new manuscript when she came across a word that she was sure wasn't real English. He said "Oh, I'm sure it's in the dictionary!" so she went to look. A few minutes later she comes in, throws the volume at him, and storms out. Confused, he flips to the word in the volume and finds the etymology is... his earlier book!
- InclinedPlane 13y agoI believe most hapax legomena to be cromulent.
- Intermernet 13y agoAre you just trying to embiggen the cromulence around here?
- gshubert17 13y agoThis is a real problem, especially in Homeric Greek and Biblical Hebrew. One approach to figuring out what such words mean, is to go to similar words in related languages. Another is to use earlier translations (such as the Septuagint from Hebrew to Greek in the first or second centuries BCE), when the translators likely had a better sense of what the words meant.