How to form a word to represent "drawing quote ideas"?
I'm a graphic designer. I have a project at hand in which I want to draw the underlying concepts in famous quotes.
I want to name this project, and I thought of something similar to "quote-drawing". First, I thought of "quotography", but turns out that it's not a uni-lingual term, and it's a compound word made of English and Greek languages. Is it OK to create a new word, which is composed of heterogeneous languages?
As an alternative, and as many technical terms in English are basically, morphologically and etymologically Latin or Greek, I checked the Internet and found that "παραθέτω" is the Greek word for "quote", and as we know, "graphy" can be used to denote "drawing". So I thought of "parathetography". Is this word a correct English combination?
Solution 1:
Although quotography is mixed-language, it has the virtue of communicating reasonably clearly and accurately, which I think the apparently-correct parathetography does not. (The knowledge that παραθέτω is Greek for quote is not widespread among English speakers.)
You may also find the words ideogram, logogram, and pictogram of interest. A usage note in wiktionary remarks:
...a pictogram represents by illustration, an ideogram represents an idea, and a logogram represents a word: Chinese characters are all logograms, but few are pictograms or ideograms. Casually, pictogram is used to represent all of these: it is a picture representing some concept.
Solution 2:
Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.
That said, mixed coinages are very common.
I do think there is something to trying to be consistent in languages you coin from, all things being equal. Still, there is also something to trying to be consistent with similar terms, which would probably restrict you to the Greek -graphy over anything from the Latin pingere of the English drawing.
From the other side, we don't have the same familiarity with the equivalent Greek terms for quotation.
In all, you're probably much better off living with the mixed origins, than with any other alternative.