Re: Do Eskimos count like New Guineans?

On Jan 18, 3:48 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

On Jan 17, 8:08 am, richard01 <richardparke...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

Invention - means a word (or bit of grammar) that doesn't descend
directly from an earlier language - it's genuinely new.
A vanishingly rare phenomenon -- the best-known examples in English
are "gas" and "Kodak."

I don't know about "Kodak" -- which I think never quite made it as an
ordinary English word, as opposed to a brand name -- but "gas" is
supposed to be a variant of the Greek  word khaos.  The first user of
the word, van Helmont (a Dutchman),  pronounced <g> as a velar
fricative, so his innovation, besides the semantic extension, consisted
merely of dropping the /o/.

OK, maybe it doesn't descend _directly_ from the Greek, and it did
(apparently) involve a conscious choice on van Helmont's part, but you
could hardly call it "genuinely new" either.

The Dutch voiced velar isn't relevant in English!

If "Kodak" didn't persist as the generic for 'camera', it may be
because Mr. Eastman's invention was harder to imitate than the copier
or the refigerator or the carbonated cola drink, so that xerox and
fridge and coke became applied to other makes and thus generalized
more easily than Kodak did. (My mother used to yell at my grandmother
for calling the refigerator the icebox, and then for calling the Amana
a frigidaire!)
.

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