As a linguistics major, I can provide the scientific answer to how all these words began: Nobody knows. Well, we do know that people occasionally invent new words like "googol", but most English words can be traced back thousands of years, to a language called Proto-Indo-European spoken about 5,000 years ago near the Black Sea somewhere. As the speakers of PIE spread to widely different areas and stopped communicating with each other, their language changed in different ways until eventually the different groups were unable to understand each other. From this language a plethora of different languages evolved, spoken from Iceland to India, including Icelandic, English, German, Swedish, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Persian, Hindi and hundreds more. But since the people of 5,000 years ago didn't know how to write, we can only guess what their language was like by looking at the similarities between the different languages it gave rise to. Before that point, where the language came from is anybody's guess. Some hypothesize that all the world's languages evolved from a single language but it's impossible to prove that since over time the languages would have changed so much that any similarities that could be used to prove a common origin would be erased.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language for more information on the theories of where language came from.
ermitonto Reviewed by ermitonto on . Who invents certain words? how were words like: cock or computer or codiene or anything really named? how do they think of a name? Rating: 5