#and if they're in front of others they could invent a language similar to the morse code to ping each other in silence and talk that way

[yeonban]

Took a brief sanity break from my projects to stare at a wall and think about how, in Soma's survival au, he would end up doing the things he said he would; namely get rid of both the other Obsidian Eight (bar Seiroku. He gets special privileges) and the other bands, which then got me to giggle at the mental image of Soma sending Seiroku messages through the heart whenever they're apart or with people in front of which they can't speak freely

[copperbadge]

M. Sam, and company, since it's near the weekend, I was hoping to request a bit of your wordplay expertise? To coin, or find, an affix. I was going to use neo-, except what I mean is new version AND they have no idea there are other versions. Like, Neo does convey emulation, but also to describe the part of the Matrix that doesn't realize it's an analogy written by trans people. A lack of history? Baby-babble mirroring? Greek/Latin may prevail but invite the Germanic roots, too! They're fun.

Neo just means "new", technically speaking, but it has a lot of negative connotation outside of The Matrix, so yeah perhaps not the absolute best to use.

Without knowing what word you want to affix it to, Anon, I'm hesitant to make any suggestions; when you're working with language and trying to create new conceptualizations via language, it also has to sound good. Like the reason my post about "Ledan" as a nonbinary corollary to lord/lady took off is that Ledan also sounds rad as hell. (I'm not taking credit for that, blame some Old Germans.)

Also, you're looking for something that indicates a new version where people are unaware of the old version, but it's not clear -- are the people unaware of the old version using this term, or is the term being used by someone who is aware there's an old version, but doesn't want other people to? Or are you the author using this word in that knowledge but nobody in the story knows? (Presumably knows yet.)

Now, if you're looking for an affix that doesn't necessarily front onto a specific word, I can give pointers at least -- the greatest proportion of words start with a consonant, so having an affix end on a vowel will probably pre-emptively solve you a lot of problems. A shorter affix is better, and one that doesn't echo an existing word precisely is helpful too.

I would, honestly, do what I did for Shivadh and simply invent a prefix, perhaps one that sounds familiar but has no actual English meaning. You might work with a root that indicates something is not the first -- for example, in Latin, Secundus might refer to a second son, so you could come up with something like Secu to indicate "this is a new version"; Secu has the benefit of also referring to "secular" so if pressed, someone using "secu" knowingly could say "Oh, this is just to indicate it's a plain thing, a nonreligious thing."

If you google "english to [language]", Google will pop up a translation window at the top; you can enter a word and get the foreign-language version, but below that it'll give other similar words, and sometimes grammar notes. I often will mess around in language using english-to-latin to find interesting classical roots to use, although English is so heavily affiliated to Latin that it also sometimes is easier to use a different language.

In any case, good luck! And if you want to send the actual word, please feel free, I'd like to see it.