English Words with Native Roots and with Greek, Latin, or Romance Suffixes (Classic Reprint)

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt from English Words With Native Roots and With Greek, Latin, or Romance Suffixes The following study concerns itself with an interesting by-phase of English linguistic history. My primary aim is to present the material in conveniently classified form. The discussion of the phenomena so presented is not exhaustive. On the contrary, it is merely introductory and suggestive. Practically every writer on the history of the English language has mentioned the fact that English, vastly more than any other tongue, has added foreign suffixes to native words. Even the authors of grammars for secondary schools comment on this. I have not found, however, an adequate collection of the material in respect either to a full word-list or to an approximately complete enumeration of the suffixes involved. The usual procedure is to mention from eight to twenty suffixes with not more than seventy illustrative words. Manifestly the subject is worthy of a fuller treatment than it has received. Hybrid words, objects of puristic scorn, hold an important place in spoken and written language today. Literally hundreds of them which as yet have not been corralled in the lexicons are used constantly in conversation, in the newspapers, and in magazines. I noticed not less than seventy-five during the months I was preparing this dissertation. A bootblack is a "shineologist", a heavy baseball batter is a "sluggist", a newspaper column reserved for violent crime is the "murderology" section, the pronunciation of New Yorkers is "New Yorkese", every man locally important enough to promulgate an individual doctrine or cult has his thoughts described by an -ism attached to his name, while his adherents bear his name plus an -ist or an -ite. Once the attention is called to this matter one is astonished at the absolute freedom with which the man in the street no less than his sophisticated fellow in the newspaper office attaches any suffix whatever to any word, slang or erudite, which he happens to use at the moment. Practically all of this is unconscious. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.