”Johannes Aavik, the father of modern Estonian, created nonsense words out of thin air for Estonian, of which forty survive in use today.
Another purist, an overzealous Czech, coined a replacement for kren, “horseradish,” because he thought it had been borrowed from German Chren. He didn’t realize that Chren had earlier been borrowed from Czech. (His coinage, morska retkev, was, ironically, a part-for-part translation of the GermanMeerrettich, “sea radish.” It didn’t survive.)”
You Are What You Speak (by Robert Lane Greene)