The Joy of Languages Being Themselves

Imagine a language's lexicon—all the words it contains—as a machine that spits out well-formed words.

Inside that word machine are all kinds of gears and flanges (?) and... manifolds (??) that determine the nature of the words that are spat out. They limit the sounds that are used and the various ways those sounds can be combined.

When you turn the crank on the English word machine, you get English words. But you get more than that: you also get possible English words. So you get pancake, ridiculous, and grumble and also English words that don't exist, but could.

What are examples of English words that could exist but happen not to? How about: potcake, ridiculish, and glumble (to mutter glumly, maybe). Beyond that—beyond these not-real-but-plausible words we can easily imagine and even concoct meanings for—are the truly imaginary words that don't come ready-made with connotations and possible references. Words like merb, channitude, and frift.

I claim that these are all English words. They're just English words that don't (yet?) mean anything. It's very possible no one has ever spoken them. But if someone swore that those were actual words—in the dictionary and everything!—you'd probably believe it and tell the person to calm down already. There's nothing un-English about merb or channitude. And there are regular English words that look very similar to frift. Namely, drift, grift, thrift, lift. The only reason we know (or suspect) that those aren't real words is that we've never heard them. But there are tons of English words in good standing that we've never heard. This is the basis of the game Balderdash, after all. Dictionaries are full of words no one has actually said in a hundred years.

But what if I told you that fnolr, zboshm, and glal were words? Sure, they look like I tossed a handful of Scrabble tiles onto the floor, but what if?

And what if I told you that kto, pferd, and wa'a were words? You'd probably be so sick of the whole thing you'd storm out of the room.

The moment of truth:

The first set is, of course, dumb-looking gibberish. But the second set are all words, just not English words. Kto is Russian for "who," Pferd is German for "horse," and wa'a is Hawaiian for "canoe." The boxes that produced those words have different guts from the guts of the English box, but in their languages, those words are every bit as well-formed and lived-in as pancake.

It's hard (impossible, maybe) to do it for your own language, but have you ever given thought to what words are, somehow, perfect examples of Russianness or Spanishness or Japaneseness? I think about this with relation to Korean all the time. I'll learn a new word and think, "That is just so Korean" (whatever that means). 해변 (haebyeon "beach"), 별 (pyeol "star"), and 감자 (kamja "potato") couldn't be anything but Korean, such perfect exemplars they are of what makes something sound like Korean. If they weren't actual Korean words, they could be. If they weren't real words, I can only assume Koreans would believe they were real—just not yet known to them—or at least could be, the same way English speakers wouldn't have too much trouble accepting that crat, horm, and fellish just might be real words whose acquaintance they haven't yet made.