[joubert]

Icelandic has some beautiful examples of creative language (purism), e.g. instead of using a word derived from the Greek for electricity, it uses "rafmagn" which literally means "amber power".

Another example is sími, the word for telephone (which comes from the greek "tele" (far) and "phone" (voice)).

[sethg]

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who more or less single-handedly revived the modern Hebrew language, spent a great deal of effort coming up with Hebrew words for modern things. “Telephone” was “sakh-rakhok”, from the classical Hebrew words for “conversation” and “far”. Not all of his suggestions took root: Israelis just call the telephone a “telefon”.

[Gormo]

There is a famous article called "Uncleftish Beholding", which is a summary of basic atomic theory, but written in an alternate "English" that uses only Germanic root words, replacing all words from Latin, Greek, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

[hugh3]

I was reading about this the other day, and the Arabic word for "electricity" (kahraba, apparently) is also based on the Arabic word for amber.

Chinese, on the other hand, just uses the word for "lightning". This might be a more logical choice, but it indicates that the Chinese didn't have a word for electricity until after it was discovered that lightning and electricity were actually the same thing, whereas Europeans had been using the word "electricity" since 1600ish and didn't prove the connection to lightning until the 1750s (though I assume it must have been suspected).

[chousuke]

Finns seem to like coining neologisms as well. The language is extremely productive, with every base word potentially yielding dozens of derivatives. There's even a national "language office" that tries to promote Finnish alternatives to foreign loans. Some fail to catch on, but many do.

For example, the word for telephone is "puhelin" which is derived from the verb for "to chat" using a postfix (-in) that indicates a tool of some kind.

Computers are literally "knowledge machines". The word for electricity is also interesting: It's "sähkö" which I guess derives from "sähinä", meaning buzz.