The smallest meaningful units

We think of words as being the most basic, the most fundamental, units through which meaning is represented in language. There is a sense in which this is true. Words are the smallest free-standing forms that represent meaning. Any word can be cited as an isolated item. It can serve as the headword in a dictionary list. It can be quoted. It can be combined with other words to form phrases and sentences. In general the word is the smallest unit that one thinks of as being basic to saying anything. It is the smallest unit of sentence composition and the smallest unit that we are aware of when we consciously try to create sentences.

But actually there are even smaller units that carry the fundamental meanings of a language. Words are made up of these units. Consider just the unit gen inFigure 4.1. It is clearly not a free-standing word, but rather some kind of smaller unit which goes into the make-up, the composition, of words:

These smaller units are called morphemes. Gen is a morpheme. It has a basic single meaning ‘birth’ which has split into two distinct, yet related and overlapping meanings, ‘birth, origin’ and ‘tribe, stock, nation, type.’ Looking at the words that appear under each of these meanings, one can readily see the difference. The meaning ‘origin’ is most easily seen on the middle branch below it, in words like genetic or genital.

The Early Modern English cultural scene

The linguistic period identified as Early Modern English began some time during the second half of the fifteenth century. There is no single historical event comparable to the Norman invasion of 1066 for Middle English which can be taken conveniently as the boundary between Middle and Early Modern English. The language changes which characterize the transition of Middle to Early Modern English coincide chronologically with several major cultural and social changes. The most notable among these is the introduction of the printing press, by Sir William Caxton, in 1476. This year is commonly taken as the cut-off date because it marks a turning point in the production and accessibility of books. It is also easy to remember. Another historical event which coincides roughly with the beginning of Early Modern English is the discovery of the New World in 1492. While its effect on our word-stock was not as immediate as the availability of printed books, the discovery of the Americas has had extraordinary consequences for the composition of the English lexicon.

The end-point of Early Modern English coincides with two important events which occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. We have already mentioned the appearance in 1755 of the first really influential dictionary of English, the Dictionary of the English Language (in two volumes) by Samuel Johnson. That dictionary boosted enormously the prestige of English lexicographical research.

This list includes all morphemes cited and glossed in the Root Exercises of the Workbook (Part B in each chapter), plus the affixes cited in Chapter 5 of the Textbook. The numbers in parentheses correspond to the chapter of the Workbook in which the morpheme is introduced for study or memorization.

This appendix does not include many other morphemes introduced as examples in the textbook.

Notation: In the list of examples, Latinate words, if any, are listed first. If words of ultimately Greek origin exist, they follow, separated by a semicolon. Unless otherwise noted, Greek words can be assumed to have been borrowed through the medium of Latin. In the rare cases where a word was borrowed or coined directly from Greek, the word is italicized. If only Latinate or only Greek words are present in the examples, the source is marked as respectively “L” or “G.” If both are present, the Proto-Indo-European root, marked with an asterisk, is given where transparent. Otherwise the Latin and Greek derivatives are listed separately. Hybrid words are not marked. The connecting vowel and thematic vowel -o-, if it appears in any of the examples provided, is given in parentheses for Proto-Indo-European and Greek forms. In Latin the connecting vowel underwent vowel weakening to -i- but the thematic vowel to -u-, and very often neither is found in any of the examples, so no vowel is listed for the sake of simplicity.

The two general themes of this book are the origins and the structure of English words. Our word-stock is huge. It is useful to divide it up between words that belong to the common language that everybody knows from an early age and words that are learned in the course of our education. The former, the core vocabulary, is nearly the same for everyone. The latter, the learned vocabulary, is peripheral and certainly not shared by everyone. The core vocabulary is not an area where we need special instruction – the core vocabulary is acquired at a pre-educational stage. Our learned vocabulary is a different matter. It varies greatly in size and composition from one individual to another, depending on education and fields of specialization. No single individual ever controls more than a fraction of the learned vocabulary. Often the extent of one's vocabulary becomes a measure of intellect. Knowledge about the history and structure of our words – both the core and the learned vocabulary – is a valuable asset.

The vocabulary of English is not an unchanging list of words. New words enter the language every day, words acquire or lose meanings, and words cease to be used. The online Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is updated quarterly with at least 1,000 new and revised entries; this is a fair measure of how dynamic our vocabulary is. The two sources of new words are borrowing and word-creation.

This chapter and the next deal with rules that account for allomorphy, which can affect both the spelling and the pronunciation of a morpheme. The processes that can change the shape of a morpheme are covered by three types of rules:

1. replacement rules – replace one sound by a different sound in a certain position in the morpheme;

2. deletion rules – delete a sound, or sounds, from a morpheme;

3. expansion rules – expand a morpheme by inserting a new sound within the existing structure of the morpheme.

This classification exhausts the logical possibilities of what can happen to a phonetic segment. It can be replaced, deleted, or some sequence of sounds can be expanded.

Assimilation and types of assimilation

Assimilation rules are replacement rules which have the effect of making one vowel or consonant more similar to, or even identical with, another. In principle, assimilation can affect both vowels and consonants; most instances of assimilation discussed below, however, are cases of consonantal assimilation.

The process of assimilation can be described in terms of the target, the direction, and the scope of the resulting similarity. Assimilation can target some or even all of a sound's features: voicing, place, or manner of articulation.

A quick scan of a couple of pages in a dictionary that records the origin of our vocabulary reveals that many entries in it are historically “un-English.” This is not surprising; languages travel with the people who speak them. No language in the world today uses vocabulary which is entirely free of foreign influence, just as no country's population can remain completely indigenous. A genetically “pure” language is as hard to imagine as a genetically “pure” population. Like the society we live in, the language we speak is a product of history. Like nations and governments, languages differ in their attitude and adaptability to external pressure. Periods of hostility, isolation, self-sufficiency, follow upon periods of openness, constructive interaction, and peaceful coexistence with the outside world. The overall inventory of words used in a language is the outcome of millennia of cultural, political, and intellectual history. In many ways our vocabulary mirrors the events which have taken place in the history of English-speaking peoples. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the important socio-historical events and circumstances which have shaped our vocabulary. We start with some basic notions and facts about the place of English within the enormously broad picture of languages of the world.

Fossilized allomorphy

Unlike allomorphy resulting from phonetically motivated replacement, deletion, or epenthesis, the allomorphy discussed in this chapter cannot be attributed to the operation of an active and transparent phonetic rule. “Fossilized” allomorphs can be deceptively unlike each other in form, yet they are historically related – they are cognates. The morpheme variants in this group arose as a consequence of systematic changes in pre-Old English times, going all the way back to Proto-Germanic and even to Indo-European. Within English, i.e. after the fifth century, the conditions for these early changes became obscured, and their results can no longer be seen as regular or highly predictable. If we set up a scale of predictability for allomorphic variation, allomorphs due to assimilation or consonant and vowel loss will rank very high; mostly, the conditions for these changes are transparent and recoverable. At the low end of the scale would be the non-productive allomorphic variation described in historical terms, for which the conditions have ceased to exist. At the bottom of the scale are completely unpredictable alternate forms of cognates, the subject of Section 5 below. Historical, or fossilized, allomorphy tends to follow several general patterns; familiarity with these can help us discern etymological cognates in spite of their overt differences.

We will look at three fossilized processes: the First Consonant Shift, Gradation, and Rhotacism.

Introduction and terminology

The meanings of words, and semantic analysis generally, can be discussed in terms of sense variation around a common core, and in terms of the kinds of affinities and contrasts we can discern between meanings.

Sense variation: homophony, homonymy, polysemy

In Chapter 8 we listed and commented on some roots and affixes that can easily be confused. We dealt with them under the umbrella of the neutral term homophony (‘sounding the same’). All of the pairs below count as homophones:

1. chair: to sit on vs. chair of a department

2. corn: grain, seed vs. corn on toe

3. crane: a bird vs. crane a machine

4. ear: of corn vs. ear organ of hearing

5. load: of dirt vs. lode in a gold mine

6. meal: ground up vs. meal at dinner time

7. mettle: in the sense of courage vs. metal in the sense of iron, copper

8. pupil: of your eye vs. pupil a student

9. score: a notch, vs. score a game result, vs. score a group of twenty

10. sea: body of water vs. see verb of perception

11. seal: aquatic mammal vs. seal a device for making imprints

12. sole: fish vs. sole only vs. sole of a shoe, vs. soul in a religious sense

13. trip: journey vs. trip to obstruct, cause to fall

14. waist: of a person vs. waste squander

The term homophony, useful as it is, bundles together words of the type chair (to sit on) – chair (of a department) and corn (on the cob) – corn (on toe).

Unassimilated classical words

English contains classical words and phrases of two types:

1. (1) Those that have been assimilated into English, and have simply become English words: all the early borrowings, also most borrowings during and before the Renaissance and most scientific words coined recently from Latin and Greek bases. These words follow the phonological patterns of English, and frequently show semantic nativization (see Chapter 9, Section 2.3): abbot, circus, comet, cumulus, delta, demon, locus, psyche, tunic, system.

2. (2) Classical words that are either recognizably recent borrowings, or words and phrases fossilized in legal or scientific language. These words and phrases are commonly italicized in print: casus belli ‘reason for war’ (Lat. casus ‘case’ + belli, gen. of bellum ‘war’), panta rhei ‘everything is in flux,’ sensu stricto ‘in the strict sense,’ viva voce ‘with a living voice, by speaking.’ The OED editions prior to the current New Edition uses the parallel symbol ∥ for a “non-naturalized” or “alien” entry.

The bulk of this book has been concerned with the former group, the words of classical origin that are now fully assimilated into English, and this chapter will be no exception. Before turning to the main topic, however, it may be useful to deal with the second group and recount briefly how unassimilated classical words and phrases are pronounced in English.

This book is about the sources of English words, about their etymology and history, about their sound-structure, and about some formal properties of English word-formation rules. It is important to realize, however, that it is not about all possible origins, it is not about all the ways in which English has introduced new words into the language, but rather it is primarily about a particular subset, that portion of the vocabulary which is borrowed from the classical languages (Latin and Greek) either directly, or indirectly through French.

This (very large) portion of our vocabulary is a familiar subject. Greek and Latin roots in the English language have been studied and have been part of the core educational curriculum at least since the Renaissance. Departments of Classical Languages traditionally offer courses under titles like “Classical Roots in English,” and in the past a decent education necessarily included a full program in the classics. In the twenty-first century, however, it is extremely rare for students entering college to have a clear idea even of what Latin is – some ancient language, perhaps –, or whether English is derived from it or not, and even what it means for a language to be “derived,” in any sense, from another. The word cognate is not only generally unknown to undergraduate students, it often remains conceptually obscure, because it is simply not one of the topics we grow up with these days.

Morphological rules

It is common knowledge that over time words may change both their form and their meaning. Knowing the etymology of a word requires familiarity with the ways in which its phonetic shape has evolved, and familiarity with the evolution of its semantic content. Recognizing the variants of the word components enables us to link words together in more interesting and revealing ways. This and the following two chapters will deal with some regular changes in the phonological form of roots, affixes, and whole words. We will refer to these regularities as morphological rules.

Types of allomorphy

Many of the alternations that we find in roots and affixes can be attributed to the interaction of phonological properties, in which case we talk of regular allomorphy. Regular allomorphs are said to be transparent because one can easily recognize that the two forms are variants of a single form. The changes that the morphemes undergo may affect only the pronunciation of a morpheme, or both its spelling and pronunciation. In either case the variation can be described in terms of regular changes; in that sense, the allomorphs are predictable.

The first type of regularity is illustrated by the pair invent–convene, both derived from the root √ven ‘come, bring.’ More examples of this type of allomorphy are locus–allocate from √loc ‘place,’ dysphagia–necrophagous from √phag ‘eat,’ psychiatry–pediatric from √iatr ‘treat,’ bibliophile–philosophy from √phil ‘love,’ sole–solitude from √sol ‘alone, single.’

This is a completely revised version of English Words. We reorganized and expanded the material on word-origins in Chapter 1, updating it with references to the most recent trends of blending and shortening associated with texting and other forms of electronic communication. Our chapters on the morphological composition and phonetic structure of English are also rewritten and updated, and now include a new classification of the types of allomorphy, as well as discussions of important topics such as segment sonority and the historical shifting of long vowels in English. Revisions in Chapters 6 and 7 will provide more information and clarify obscure points concerning the word-formation rules. Chapter 8 has a new section on Grimm's Law, explaining some of the deep historical allomorphic links between Germanic and Latinate cognates. Our discussion of semantic change, in Chapter 9, was reorganized and significantly enriched. Chapter 10 contains new sections on syllable division and syllable weight, leading to a more principled account of the stress-rules of the loan vocabulary of English. The Appendix, which contains all root morphemes from the Workbook and the affixes in Chapter 5, has been thoroughly revised.

This second edition is also accompanied by a Workbook arranged to correspond to the chapters in the textbook. All Workbook exercises and root lists have been revised and updated; many new exercises have been added. The link to the Workbook includes a special chapter on recently borrowed words from both ancient and modern languages, and one on technical vocabulary in law and medicine.

This chapter turns to deletion rules, as well as other kinds of allomorphy, some of which can be recovered only historically. The first set of changes to be considered produces allomorphic variation due to the dropping of one or more sounds from the edges of the original forms of roots or affixes. Like replacement rules, deletion rules must be defined in terms of both the phonological environment and the type, position, and number of morphemes involved in the change.

Consonant deletion

More on double consonants. The general principle which governs the simplification of double consonants to single ones, phonetically, is that English, unlike Italian, Finnish, and many other languages, does not allow “long” or “double” consonants within a word. Our discussion of double consonant spelling in Chapter 6, Section 4.2, pointed out the important distinction between double consonants in the spelling, which can arise as a consequence of total assimilation, and “long” consonants in the pronunciation. Morpheme-internal double consonant letters are not pronounced “long”: balloon and saloon have only one [l], lemma and lemon have only one [m], and peddle and pedal have the same short consonant in the middle.

English allows real “long” consonants, but only at clear word and morpheme boundaries: file log, big garden, roommate, bus-schedule, bookcase, sad day, unnoticed, dissatisfied, etc. The phonetic nature of the abutting long consonants is not identical: the one to the left is “unreleased,” because it is syllable-final, but the one to the right is fully released into the following segment in the syllable to the right.