I wonder about the evolution of words for technology
I am surrounded by electricity, electronics, time and labor saving devices. Sometimes, I imagine a person from one of the tribes that are unaware of what developed nations have at hand coming into my house and being amazed at so much that we take for granted.
There are some tribes in Brazil who were happened upon in the late 20th century, and anthropologists agreed to avoid exposing them to the world outside their domain.
I was watching an episode of Ancient Aliens, which discussed the books of Enoch and Ezekial in the Bible. The commentators believe that the wheel of fire and other descriptions denote space ships.
I started wondering how humans add words to describe technology to their vocabulary. A term such as Iron Horse came into use to describe steam engines, and we've used many Greek words to make words such as telephone. But if humans don't have words in their vocabulary to begin with and are essentially living with Stone Age technology, how do they come up with words to describe something they've just seen for the first time ever and have no experience with the components that make up, with say, a phone?
Thanks for comments.
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I have spent a lot of time pondering such things. For most of my childhood I was exposed to multiple languages and cultures via immigrants including family, so I guess it was natural for me to be curious about them all. So I included linguistics in my BA degree.
What I can say, briefly, about human history prior to the industrial technology age is that many words were developed by a sound a thing made, in other cases its color or a sense it stimulated. There were many ways and means employed over millennia.
In the post industrial, it is often accomplished through reassigning words to name a thing as well as describe its function or even use it as slang, the word google* might be a reasonable example, the word has morphed its way through the parts of speech in just a couple years compared to the shifts made over far longer periods of time in the past for other words and the language of origin is a factor to consider.
So many variables, worthy of a scientific inquiry if one or more haven't been done. I bet there have been a couple, at least, modern language morphology is a popular subject in linguistics. I confess, I don't keep up with the academics these days. It's a very deep subject.
*Although a recent article I saw last week indicated that the word fuck has found its way into every part of speech so there's that... it is a better example.
