Dear and loyal readers! In this post I am going to write about the invented words that appear in Gulliver's Travels and I will give you some examples of these words.
Sometimes, Jonathan Swift created new terms in this book in order to cover up what he really wanted to mean, but most of time, the language invented by him is formed by nonsense words, not all of them have a meaning.
I will give you some examples of both, nonsense invented words, and invented words with meaning.
There are many examples of the first type. One of it is Glumgluffs that is located in the first voyage, the voyage to Lilliput, and for the context we can deduce that it is a kind of measure. In the voyage to Brobdingnag it can been found an invented expression, it is Relplum Scalcath that according to Gulliver means freak of nature, an exception to the general laws of nature. Also in the third voyage it can be seen invented words such as Flandona Gagnole, that refers to the astronomers's cave. To end up with the examples of nonsense invented words I take one of the last voyage, it is the word yahoo. With this word it is named a kind of humanoid creature who lives in the Houynhnhms land.
The examples of the second type are fewer. Lilliput itself could be a word with meaning. It could be formed by two separated words: "lilli" that could mean little and "put" that may have been from de Latin "putus" and means little boy. Another example of this kind of words is Brobdingnag that may have been formed as an anagram of big, grand and noble but without using the syllable -le. The last example I give you comes from the voyage to Laputa. In it appears two words, Tribnia and Langden, in order to refer to a kingdom visited by Gulliver. These words are in fact an anagram of Britain and England.
To end up I say that there are more examples of invented words in Gulliver's Travels but I hope you will enjoy these examples, and also I hope you will find this post interesting.
