How are new words formed in Spanish?

Question

English has many ways in which new words are formed, like affixation, compounding, borrowing, etc... How does Spanish form new words?

Answer 1

Exactly the same way:

• préstamos (borrowings)
• prefijación y sufijación (affixation)
• derivación
• composición
• ...

Answer 2

Actually, we just sit all day under a comfy spiny cactus, nicely wrapped in a wool sarape, until the heat makes us hallucinate and start speaking in tongues.

If you just watch us carefully, we'll suddenly jump up and say something like "¡Tequila!" or "¡Mamacita!"

After thousands of years of this, eventually there is enough vocabulary to make a language.

People from the Americas would occasionally pop in a hot pepper, just so as to not go very far for food, and new interesting words would come out, such as "¡Ay Chihuahua!"

The Spanish just had those funny sideways hats, and since they did not have their eyes covered, they could see the señoritas, which in turn would stimulate the origin of exciting new words, such as "¡Óoolee!"

All natural evolution, anyway.

No deberías haberle dicho la verdad. Y yo que intentaba convencerlo de que el español tiene morfología... - lazarus1907, Sep 20, 2010

Lo siento, mi estimado Lazarus. Yo creo que la farsa ya ha ido demasiado lejos. Es hora de que los miembros del foro se den cuenta de que estudiar es una gran pérdida de tiempo, ¡porque en realidad todo es una jerigonza inventada sin sentido! - Gekkosan, Sep 20, 2010

Disculpe, pero esa es la razón que tenemos que estudiar. Es imposible contestar la pregunta, '¿Por qué?'. Es simplemente cómo se dice Tenemos que memorizar todo. - KevinB, Sep 20, 2010

Answer 3

Actually, Spanish is not allowed to form new words. They have an academy that's been charged with preventing that from happening. They publish a dictionary to inform people of what words they are allowed to use. Any new words are denigrated as being some sort of Spanglish, and, therefore, evil.

Fortunately, most people ignore the dictionary and just make up new words the normal ways. Eventually the academy gives up and puts the new words in the dictionary.