I often come up with ideas for general concepts and can’t think of a way to invent a nice sounding name for them. The conventional method seems to be to use Latin. However, I’m not fluent in Latin and when I use an online translator, I’m never sure if the word is fitting.
For instance, I might have a philosophic concept I want to name after something like, “adaptable attitude”. So I find “adaptability” in Latin and it ends up meaning ONLY adaptability pertaining to mechanical tools or something.
Does anyone have any suggestions for coming up with intelligent but creative and interesting names for new concepts (other than just making up stuff like “ooga booga” haha)?
I have taken about 5 consecutive years in Latin. Here’s a few tips:
No one really knows the entire language of Latin as it was spoken by the past cultures,
There are many English words for which there exsists no suitable Latin word. You may have to settle for some Latin word that barely means, “adaptability”.
I’m not really looking for “adaptability”, it was a purely hypothetical example. In any case, it sounds like you’re saying that it’s rather inexact so it’s ok to just muddle through it?
Greek is always good to look to. In Pericles’ famous funeral speech praising the nature of the Athenian, he speak specifically of their “adaptability” and “versatility”.
He calls them:
isopalies kindunos, that is equal-in-struggle to (all) risks, so isopalic might be a good adjective.
Later he refers to them as “eutropelos” and “autoarkes”, that is versatile (or literally well-turning or turning towards the good) and self-sufficient (or literally self-founding), so in English eutropic seems the closest to adaptablity, or there is autoarchic for something more self-sustaining.
If you expand on your concept, perhaps we could come up with something more exact to what you mean.
Again, I said “For instance, I might have a philosophic concept I want to name after something like, ‘adaptable attitude’”. That means this was only a hypothetical example.
I am not looking for a word for anything even remotely related to “adaptability” or “aptitude”.
I’m asking only for advice on finding names for concepts in general.
That said, I like your suggestion of looking at Greek - thanks much!
I’m the king at this shit. So my advise for you: whenever you need to find a word for a concept, ask the king. For the “adaptable attitude”, I give you “tramp”.
