New inventions turn old terms into retronyms

Words such as acoustic guitar and landline emerged when newer inventions made it necessary to distinguish older versions, ERR reports. In its “Keeleminutid” series, Kairi Janson, a coordinator and terminologist at EKI, explains how such retronyms enter the language.

When Americans George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker invented the electric guitar in 1931, they helped pave the way for rock music and also prompted a change in language. The acoustic guitar had existed long before the electric version, but it was not previously called “acoustic”. Once the two had to be distinguished, “guitar” became the general term and the earlier instrument acquired the qualifier “acoustic”.

A retronym is a word or phrase introduced to identify an original or earlier thing, phenomenon or activity. It adds a qualifier that was unnecessary before a new counterpart appeared: when the acoustic guitar was the only kind, there was no need to specify that it was acoustic.

Historical events are another source of retronyms. The First World War is called that only because there was a second. In the 1920s, it would have seemed ominous to call the recently ended conflict the first of its kind; it was simply known as the World War. When a second, even larger war began, the earlier one became the First World War. Similarly, phrases such as “the first Estonian period” or “the period of the first republic” are retronyms, although “pre-occupation Estonia” would be more precise.

Technology has generated many retronyms as inventions gain more advanced counterparts. A cathode-ray television was simply a television before flat-screen models appeared. Likewise, a landline was just a phone before mobile phones, and most ordinary computers were desktop computers before laptops came along.

Early cinema audiences went to see films, or moving pictures, not silent films, even though the films had no sound. The first widely distributed sound film appeared in 1927, decades after the first cinema screenings in Estonia. The first sound film shown in Estonia was “The Singing Fool”, screened in 1929 after the Gloria Palace cinema, housed in the building of what is now the Südalinna theatre, acquired sound equipment. Until then, “film” referred to silent films.

One recent example is “in-person learning”. The term gained wider use during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it became important to distinguish studying in the same physical classroom from meeting virtually. Before that, classroom learning was the norm, so people often referred simply to “learning”.

Retronyms show how language changes along with the world. In 50 or 100 years, today’s ordinary expressions may become retronyms, such as “a car with a driver” or “a physical computer”.