Autolex

Wednesday 1 November 2017

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The Autolex is a generative tool for conceptual thinking. It currently holds 18,432 possible words.

It is a very simple system made up of two lists – one of prefixes and the other of suffixes – the prefixes provide the end of the definition for the generated word, and the suffixes define the start. For example, the suffix -obial is equivalent to "The small yet living or vitalised quality of,"; and the prefix Cosmo is equivalent to "the cosmos, world or 'outer' and/or that which pertains to the universe seen as a well-ordered whole." Together, they make:

Cosmobial: The small yet liv­ing or vi­tal­ised qual­ity of the cos­mos, world or 'outer' and/or that which per­tains to the uni­verse seen as a well-​ordered whole.

The only other trick is to truncate the last letter of the prefix if it matches the first letter of the suffix, as is the case with the -o- in cosmo + obial.

Some favourites

Anarchomorphic: An object, process or function that takes its shape from or is literally formed of that which lacks obedience to an authority.

Abhorrocene: An age of that which is abhorrent, repugnant and capable of inspriring absolute disgust.

Gaiatude: An object, individual or process which contains qualities of that which relates to the ancient Greek goddess of the earth, mother of the Titans and more generally to the earth as we understand it today.

Tic-tectonic: A large-scale (often global) event, object or process of that which is both idiosyncratic and habitual, repetitive and nonrhythmic.

Oedious: An object, entity or event qualified or characterised by that which relates to Oedipus or Oedipial functioning.

Cosmobial: The small yet living or vitalised quality of the cosmos, world or 'outer' and/or that which pertains to the universe seen as a well-ordered whole.

Annihiapeutic: A therapy or remedial process concerned with annihilation, complete destruction and/or obliteration.

Urational: A rationality of that which is primitive, original, or earliest.

Why does it work?

Most of the words provided by the autolex 'work' due to its use of compounding and blending. This is a common, productive word-formation technique in the English language which takes morphemes and adds them together – it does this in both hyphenated (e.g. Tic-tectonic) and solid form (e.g. Oedious). The autolex levereages the neoclassical compound form in particular, which composes words from classical language roots (Latin or ancient Greek).

The (neoclassical) compound is at the heart of 'modern' technical and scientific vocabulary and its use (or overuse) during the transition from Middle English to Modern English sparked what is known as the Inkhorn Controversy. As Geoffrey Hughes writes:

The Inkhorn Controversy, as it is termed by historians of the language, derived indirectly from the invention of printing in that it arose from the issues generated in translating the classics, which the dissemination of the press had made more popular and economical. In the 'new' sciences, many borrowed words were accepted as the basic technical vocabulary. Some of these terms, like algebra (1541), alcohol (1543), and chemistry (1605), came from the Arabs, but most of the word-stock came from Latin and Greek. These included anatomy (1528), optics (1579), mathematics (1581) and physics (1589). From the pages of Francis Bacon alone we find first instances of such scientific neologisms as dissection, acid, hydraulic and suction.1

Brought about by this cultural renaissance, such words were often adopted into or created within English to fill a morphological or, more often, semantic gap. A semantic gap occurs when a particular meaning or distinction which is visible elsewhere within the lexicon (or is present in a foreign vocabulary) is absent.2 However, not all writers or academics of the time agreed with this 'latinisation' of English as a means of filling such holes. In his 1573 Book of Witcraft, Ralph Lever recognised that there was a need for new terms to define new concepts or devices and argued that preexisting monosyllabic English words would allow for adequate compound terms rather than adopting seemingly overcomplicated Latin:

Nowe the question lyeth, whether it were better to borrowe termes of some other toung, in whiche this sayde Arte hath bene written: and by a litle chaunge of pronouncing, to séeke to make them Englishe wordes, whiche are none in déede: or else of simple vsual wordes, to make compounded termes, whose seuerall partes considered alone, are familiar and knowne to all english men? For trial hereof, I wish you to aske of an english man, who vnderstandeth neither Gréek nor Latin, what he conceiueth in his mind, when he heareth this word a backset, and what he doth conceiue when he heareth this terme a Predicate.3

Lever lost, and by 1665, with the creation of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (a name itself indicating the extent of his defeat), academics began publishing scientific periodicals in English (not Latin), accelerating the introduction of new, complex, compound terminology. This history is, in part, what makes non-standard generations such as 'Infragamous' intelligible to a contemporary audience.4

The other reason such words 'work' (which we are discovering quickly in this account) is due to the interwoven historical and material qualities of language itself – to politics, pronunciation, probability and paranomasia. For example: oedious works all the better in its homophonic (and, perhaps, semantic) relation to odious; geoceptual to geospatial; parascopic to periscopic; ecoecho, tic-tectonic, tic-technics or libididex through alliteration and repetition; contrafacture through it's speculative connection to Walther von der Vogelweide's Kontrafaktur; schizography through Lacan's essay of the same name (and of which perhaps the autolex is an example 5) or Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis. The list goes on.

This is not yet a question of meaning, but of functionality. In their writing together, Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) explore this distinction through their own 'pragmatic' theory of language; provocatively, they write of language not as a communicative medium to be reconstructed scientifically (as in conventional lingustic approaches), but rather a (somewhat ambivalent) power-relation that 'compels obedience': “[a] rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker.”6

In a sense, we can see this sentiment at play in Lever's nationalist critique of latinisation in English. The function of using (and, indeed, advocating for) 'backset' over 'predicate' is not to more adequately communicate a given idea, but rather to compel a more 'authentic' British identity into existence.7 Throughout their philosophy D&G are less interested in the question of what language is – and to this we might add politics, economics, psychology, etc – than in what it does, in what cases, where, when and how it functions within a “a whole micropolitics of the social field”.

We might think of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) (Oulipo) as a kind of examplar in this context. The Oulipo, comprised of a group of writers and mathematicians, sought to emphasize systematic, self-restricting means of making texts which often resulted in nonsense. One of their most famous poetry techniques – n+7 – replaces every noun in an existing text with the noun that follows seven entries after it in the dictionary. Such a procedure takes Jane Austen's opening line of Pride and Prejudice – “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” – and translates it into:

It is a tuber universally acknowledged, that a single mandible in postcard of a good founder, must be in want of a willingness.8

This is an obviously playful approach to language, one which actively elides authoritative or scientific modes of analysis or meaning-making. Jacques Bens: "Potential literature would be that which awaits a reader, which yearns for him, which needs him in order to fully realize itself"

Some concepts call for archaisms, and others for neologisms, shot through with almost crazy etymological exercises: etymology is like a specifically philosophical athleticism. 9

Finally, the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: "This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers." 9

Footnotes

  1. Hughes, G. (1988) Words in Time. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell (The Language Library). p.101 ↩

  2. A classic example within contermporary English is the gender neutral parental sibling or sibling-child; while we have father (male), mother (female) and parent (neutral), there is no equivalent for an uncle or aunt. Pibling and nibling have been proposed. ↩

  3. Lever, R. (1573) The arte of reason, rightly termed, witcraft teaching a perfect way to argue and dispute. London. Adopting Lever's method of witcraft here, an interesting exercise might be to take the neologism 'autolex' itself as an example to evaluate such a constrained approach. In line with the 'neoclassical' sensibility described above, auto- derives from the ancient Greek αὐτο- meaning self- and is used here as a clipping of automatic (itself derived from αὐτόματος or autómaton meaning self-moving). The 'suffix' '-lex' is in-fact intended as an abbreviation of the word lexicon, also of ancient Greek origin. Combined, they form a portmanteau of clipped compounds: Automatic + Lexicon becomes auto- + lexicon which turns to auto + lex. It would seem that there is no word for an automatic process that derives from Old English and Proto-Germanic roots – as a rough approximation we might use the prefix self- or seolf- and the term stir or styriende (displaced by move) to give self-stirring or seolfstyriende. To this we could add word-loca (-loca meaning lock, or enclosed space) or word-hord (-hord similarly meaning hoard or store) both terms for vocabulary present in Old English. This gives self-stirring word-hoard or (more speculatively) seolfstyriende wordhord. wordtōl (word-tool) or wordwyrhta (word-worker) from wyrhta we get wright (as in playwright) ↩

  4. Incidentally, a search for 'Infragamous' appears to show only a single use case in a book of 'Essays on the history of the Tamil people, language, religion and literature' published in 1914, in which Muttusvami Srinivasa Aiyangar writes: “The Brahmans of the East coast, though they consider themselves purer in blood, are generally darker in complexion (like the Brahmans of Bengal) than the easy going wealthy and infragamous Namburis, which is no doubt due to the climatic conditions and the hardships they had been subjected to during the previous ten centuries of residence on the scorching plains of the unprotected East. I have called them 'infragamous' as there has been a kind of social sanction to the loose marital connection of the younger male members of the Aryan Brahmans with the women of the Dravidian castes in the Kerala country.” ↩

  5. “...'the poetics of Freud's work' constitutes the 'first entry way into its meaning.' Far from forgetting this lesson, Lacan stresses it with research which, even in his early publications, probes into 'style.' Thus, even before his dissertation, in 1932, his study of a 'schizography' is directed towards defining, within pathological writing, the procedures 'related to procedures uniformly present in poetic creation.' In 1933, Lacan's thesis opens onto 'the problem of style,' that is, onto a group of questions 'forever unresolvable for an anthropology which is not freed from the naive realism of the object...'” De Certeau, M. (1983) Lacan: An Ethics of Speech. Representations, No. 3. p.25 ↩

  6. “[Language] is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.” Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. p. 88 ↩

  7. The role of subjectivation through language is of real importance in D&G's 'pragmatic lingustics'. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle writes: “I fight with words in order to compel my opponent to recognize me and to adopt the image of myself I wish to impose on him. [...] One becomes a subject by acquiring a linguistic place and imposing it on others” Lecercle, J.-J. (1990) The Violence of Language. pp. 252–257 ↩

  8. The Spoonbill Generator ↩

  9. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994) What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press (European Perspectives). p.8 ↩ ↩2