In Arabic we have a totally different concept: We build the words in certain structures to make a new meanings. For example, "(x)a(y)e(z)" is the strcuture for the doer of a verb, while "ma(x)(y)u(z)" is the structure for the third participe. The verb "(x)(y)(z)" = "(k)(t)(b)" means "to write". (k)a(t)e(b) means "writer" and "ma(k)(t)u(b)" means "written". SO the affixes are not always added to the beginning or the end of the word in all languages!
Yep! This is a very good point. These templates are really interesting and fun! We talk about them more (albeit with Hebrew rather than Arabic examples) in the extra materials for this episode back on our website: www.thelingspace.com/episode-17
Thanks for keeping these amazing videos coming on the schedule that you have been! They've been an immeasurable help to me, as well as extremely fun. You are and your team fantastic, and you deserve more subscribers. Thanks very much ^_^
Thanks so much! I really appreciate that comment - we try to make them both fun and informative, and it's great to know that's working. I'll pass this on to the rest of the team, too. And if you want to help us get more subscribers, just let more people know about us! It's a great help. Thanks again for this - it's made my morning brighter. ^_^
You mentioned "Trans-" as a derivational affix that's meaningful but can't stand on its own, but recently at least it's been used as its own word, effectively a shortening of "transgendered". How do linguists think about words like that? It's effectively a stranded prefix that's implying the rest of a word, which, when you look at it closely, seems pretty strange to me.
I think that given the unproductiveness (how's that for derivational morphology? :p) of this prefix, it has taken on more meaning and become an independent word.
Yeah, I was hoping someone would bring this up! This is a particularly interesting word derivation case for me. Basically, I think that trans (and cis) are undergoing clipping, where you cut off a part of a word to get towards a new word (often a casual or jargon-y version of the original). So you see this in like phone or plane or exam, etc. I think what's interesting about "trans" is that you're cutting off basically the whole affix and treating that as a word; it doesn't usually line up that neatly. So it's just linguistically cool, on top of being a general plus that the concept is getting better known. ^_^
the idea that we want to put affixes at the end is a funny one. We want to say mother-in-laws, but we have to think hard to say mothers-in-law, attorneys-at-law, notaries-public.
Yeah, it is really, really awkward to form those, to the degree that even knowing that this is how it works, I still often get those words wrong. It's a pretty powerful pull!
I'm feeling the urge to point out to you that the -en suffix in German is strongly submitted to assimilation rules although I realize that your mentioning of it was just an example. Just wanted to let you know that it would never naturally occur to me to pronounce "sagen" as [za:gən] but always as [za:gŋ].
That's a fair point! I was talking about this with our director, who's a German speaker, and she says that definitely assimilation happens in casual speech all the time there, but that in more of a formal context, like on the news, she thinks there's less assimilation, and it'd stick with then [ən] pronunciation. But given our tone, maybe the assimilation one would have been a better choice. Thanks for this! ^_^
Your director has made an interesting point. I would agree that, in some places, reducing the infinitive suffix in accordance with the progressive assimilation rule is associated with casual speech. This is definitely true, for example, in [ne:mən] which can become [ne:m:] or [de:nən] which might turn into [de:n:]. These two may indeed be perceived as sloppy speech. However, [ha:bən] becoming [ha:bm] would be my choice of pronunciation regardless of context, same as our original example [za:gŋ]. So it seems that, at least to me, unless the suffix doesn't become indistinguishable from the final sound in the stem, reducing the infinitive sounds perfectly proper. I've just put on "Tagesschau" and heard pretty much only reduced [ən] suffixes (which, as you know, is also a plural marker). "Kollegen" will be pronounced as [ko'le:gŋ], "belogen" becomes [bəlo:gŋ], "hatten" will be [hatn]. I could hear no trace of schwa. Of course you've made no mistake in choosing the more conventionally correct way of saying the word. In Bavarian German (not Bavarian dialect but most Bavarians' way of speaking Hochdeutsch), this assimilation process is much less frequent. So someone from over there might have a completely different take on this. In my region, however, it's my observation that we only ever pronounce [ən] in instances when overpronouncing it is necessary - because perhaps the person you're speaking to for some reason cannot understand what you're saying. Interestingly, exactly this semantic concept was triggered in me when I heard you say the unreduced word: it didn't trigger the semantic concept of "to say," but specifically that of "to say" when you're giving a child a dictation exercise or repeating it after someone couldn't understand for the third time. This is probably why I was a bit thrown off and felt the sudden urge to comment. I hope my tone isn't too direct: I sometimes have a hard time with register. I am a German native speaker, as I'm sure has become evident. :) I'm glad you valued my contribution nontheless; let it be said that I love this channel and I look forward to watching the new episode every week. Keep up the great work.
That's really interesting! And no, the tone was fine. I know there's a lot of dialectal variation in German (I have German-speaking friends from a few different places), but I didn't know about these differences here. Your reaction in particular to how I pronounced it is very cool! I'm glad you're really into the channel, and we'll do our best! ^_^
"Inflammable" comes from "inflame", where the in- is the same as in "ingenious", "incite", "incline", etc. It's different from the confusingly identical in- which reverses meaning.
Yeah, English definitely has some unfortunate lexical and morphological ambiguity from having affixes that are pronounced the same like that. At least "flammable" / "inflammable" isn't too confusing, usually.
morphemes are not a good tool to analyze derivational morphology in languages. They cant explain or accurately analyze how words like "goose - geese" work, or how semitic languages derives their words using different patterns from their tri-consonantal root. For example, in Arabic "kitaab" is "book" and "kutub" is "books", "jamal" is "camel" and "jimaal" is "camels". As you can see, the pattern for the singular in the first example is used as the pattern for the plural in the second example. Moreover, these words cant be broken down to smaller units of meaning or "morphemes".
This is an interesting point! But you'll note that the pronunciation of [ejbɫ], as the freestanding word, vs. [əbɫ] or [ɪbɫ], as the affix, are actually different, and their behaviour is predictable based on the phonological variant. We can also see similar behaviour for, say, [nɑt] vs. the contracted version [nt]; they may have similar meanings, but their morphosyntax works differently.
The distinction between a standalone word and its combining form used in compounds can be an interesting discussion for linguists. It can also *confuse* someone who doesn't know much about linguistics.
Ah, yeah, I see your point here. I don't think that came up in our internal discussion when we were writing and editing the episode. We do run our scripts by people who don't know linguistics, but this didn't get flagged, and so we just went with it. I hope this wasn't too confusing! Sorry.
Sure, since you asked, here's a pretty involved run at it. ^_^ So, traditionally, [nt] has been thought of as a clitic, which is an independent morpheme that's been shortened and attached onto another independent morpheme, making it look a bit like an affix. The [z] sound found at the end of "she's" can be a cliticized form of either "is" or "has," and the [j] sound found at the beginning of "y'all" is a cliticized form of "you." By analogy, [nt] is supposed to be a cliticized version of "not." But because [nt] is supposed to come from [nɑt], we expect to find one wherever we find the other, and this turns out to be not quite true. So, in general, we only find [nt] after modal and auxiliary verbs, which isn't too surprising, since we usually only find the uncontracted form [nɑt] after modal and auxiliary verbs, too. In cases where [nɑt] follows something else, though, we see a different pattern. While we can say (1a), we can't say (1b). (1a) She will try not to dance too much. (1b) *She will tryn't to dance too much. This preference on the part of [nt] for certain classes of verb (i.e., modals and auxiliaries) is more a characteristic of affixes than clitics. Because of this, some linguists have proposed that [nt] is actually the same sort of thing as [əbɫ]. That is, it's a suffix that doesn't come from [nɑt] any more than "-able" [əbɫ] comes from "able" [ejbɫ] (except historically). (2a) Kimmy is unbreakable =/= *Kimmy is unbreak able But even if [nt] is a clitic of [nɑt], it still definitely patterns differently. For one, it can sometimes induce a unique change inside the word it attaches to; for instance, "will not" becomes "won't" and not "willn't." And sometimes it can't show up when you'd otherwise expect it to; so, there are no contracted forms of either "am not" or "may not" (at least, in standard English; let's leave "ain't" for another day). If you'd like to explore more about how we can tell the difference between clitics and affixes, you can check out this short but thorough discussion on the topic, by Arnold Zwicky and Geoff Pullum: web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/ZPCliticsInfl.pdf. ^_^
