As systems of signs, languages are in continuous evolution. One example of this evolution is the capacity embedded in any language to develop and expand its vocabulary and thus meet the necessity of creating new words for new discoveries. In this sense, language can be metaphorically described as an organic being, or better, as a life instrument for living beings. No language therefore can be said to be dead. Not even Latin or ancient Greek, as long as there will be at least readers, if not writers and speakers of these languages, who discover new meanings for old words, or create new words altogether by attaching old and/or new meanings to old and/or new signifiers. Furthermore, Latin is still used as the official language of the Vatican. Many don't know that it is still an option for any Ph.D. candidate in any subject to write one's own dissertation in Latin. Unsurprisingly, hardly anyone chooses to do so. Finally, Latin is often used by editors of ancient texts for the prefaces to their editions; see e.g. the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana.

Let us say, then, that as a life instrument for living beings, language is alive. It is beyond the scope of this website to ask how language was born. Instead we must focus on how actual languages work. For our goal is, as it were, protreptic, that is, to inspire potential language learners to learn more languages and more about language.

How can systems of signs develop into the richly complex historical languages? One way of understanding how a language evolves is to look at its vocabulary. How are new words created? There are many possible ways. Here we shall focus on tropes. Tropes may contribute to creating new words. Among these rhetorical devices we find metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy.

Using a metaphor, I would like to rename these ominously sounding rhetorical devices 'language generators', because they can contribute to the development not only of the vocabulary but also of the types of syntactical structures and constructs in virtually any language. They can make signs, linguistic signs, that is, they help us attach meaning to the phonic signifiers, i.e. to the sounds, thereby creating words.

A good example of a new word created from a metaphor is the word Internet. It is composed of two parts: inter and net.

The Latin preposition inter is present in English in many other compounds, e.g. international and interact, and also as a word of its own, but only in Latin expressions which survive in Enlish in certain special registers, e.g. legal jargon. See the entry in the OED: '`between', `among', occurs in a few Latin phrases occasional in Eng., e.g. inter alia, amongst other things (less usually inter alios, amongst others, other persons); inter nos, between ourselves; inter partes (Law), of an action: relevant only to the two parties in a particular case (see quots. 1966); of a deed or the like: made between two parties; inter se, between or among themselves; inter vivos, between living persons (esp. of a gift as opposed to a legacy).'

Net is also an English word, whose basic meaning is given in the OED as 'An openwork fabric made of twine or strong cord, forming meshes of a suitable size, used for the capture of fish, birds, or other living things.'

I found no specific entry for Internet in the most recent on-line edition of the OED. For the Merriam-Webster the Internetis 'an electronic communications network that connects computer networks and organizational computer facilities around the world.' (It would be interesting at this point to distinguish the Internetfrom the world wide web, which has the disadvantage of being not just a word, but a whole phrase, and therefore momentarily falls under no concern of ours.)

Internet, in other words, is born of a metaphorical use of net. There can be various types of metaphor. Here I want to spend a few words on two particular types of metaphor, the metonymy and the synecdoche. But first let's see what is a metaphor.