no other common words in English.
Similarly -dous appears in only stupendous, horrendous, tremen- dous, hazardous, and jeopardous, while -lock survives only in wed- lock and warlock and -red only in hatred and kindred. Forgiveness is the only example of a verb + -ness form. Equally some common- THE MOTHER TONGUE
seeming prefixes are actually more rare than superficial thought might lead us to conclude. If you think of forgive, forget, forgo, forbid, forbear, forlorn, forsake, and forswear, you might think that for- is a common prefix, but in fact it appears in no other common words, though once it appeared in scores of others. Why certain forms like -ish, -ness, -ful, and -some should continue to thrive while others like -lock and -gry that were once equally popular should fall into disuse is a question without a good answer.
Fashion clearly has something to do with it. The suffix -dom was long in danger of disappearing, except in a few established words like kingdom, but it underwent a resurgence (largely instigated in America) in the last century, giving us such useful locutions as officialdom and boredom and later more contrived forms like best- sellerdom. The ending -en is today one of the most versatile ways we have of forming verbs from adjectives (harden, loosen, sweeten, etc.) and yet almost all such words are less than 30o years old.
Nor is there any discernible pattern to help explain why a par-ticular affix attaches itself to a particular word or why some cre-ations have thrived while others have died of neglect. Why, for instance, should we have kept disagree but lost disadorn, retained impede but banished expede, kept inhibit but rejected cohibit?
[Cited by Baugh and Cable, page 225]
The process is still perhaps the most prolific way of forming new words and often the simplest. For centuries we had the word political, but by loading the single letter a onto the front of it, a new word, apolitical, joined the language in 1952.
Still other words are formed by lopping off their ends. Mob, for example, is a shortened form of mobile vulgus (fickle crowd). Exam, gym, and lab are similar truncations, all of them dating only from the last century when syllabic amputations were the rage. Yet the impulse to shorten words is an ancient one.
Finally, but no less importantly, English possesses the ability to make new words by fusing compounds—airport, seashore, foot- wear, wristwatch, landmark, flowerpot, and so on almost end-lessly. All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, WHERE WORDS COME FROM
eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the ele-ments reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.
6.
PRONUNCIATION
WHAT IS THE MOST COMMON VOWEL
sound in English? Would you say it is the o of hot, the a of cat, the e of red, the i of in, the u of up? In fact, it is none of these. It isn't even a standard vowel sound. It is the colorless murmur of the schwa, represented by the symbol [a] and appearing as one or more of the vowel sounds in words without number. It is the sound of i in animal, of e in enough, of the middle o in orthodox, of the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth vowels in inspirational, and of at least one of the vowels in almost every multisyllabic word in the language. It is everywhere.
This reliance of ours on one drab phoneme is a little odd when you consider that English contains as lush a mixture of phonics as any language in the world. We may think we're pretty tame when we encounter such tongue twisters as the Czech vrch pin mlh (meaning "a hill in the fog") or Gaelic agglomerations like pwy ydych chi ( Welsh for "how are you?"), but on the other
Similarly -dous appears in only stupendous, horrendous, tremen- dous, hazardous, and jeopardous, while -lock survives only in wed- lock and warlock and -red only in hatred and kindred. Forgiveness is the only example of a verb + -ness form. Equally some common- THE MOTHER TONGUE
seeming prefixes are actually more rare than superficial thought might lead us to conclude. If you think of forgive, forget, forgo, forbid, forbear, forlorn, forsake, and forswear, you might think that for- is a common prefix, but in fact it appears in no other common words, though once it appeared in scores of others. Why certain forms like -ish, -ness, -ful, and -some should continue to thrive while others like -lock and -gry that were once equally popular should fall into disuse is a question without a good answer.
Fashion clearly has something to do with it. The suffix -dom was long in danger of disappearing, except in a few established words like kingdom, but it underwent a resurgence (largely instigated in America) in the last century, giving us such useful locutions as officialdom and boredom and later more contrived forms like best- sellerdom. The ending -en is today one of the most versatile ways we have of forming verbs from adjectives (harden, loosen, sweeten, etc.) and yet almost all such words are less than 30o years old.
Nor is there any discernible pattern to help explain why a par-ticular affix attaches itself to a particular word or why some cre-ations have thrived while others have died of neglect. Why, for instance, should we have kept disagree but lost disadorn, retained impede but banished expede, kept inhibit but rejected cohibit?
[Cited by Baugh and Cable, page 225]
The process is still perhaps the most prolific way of forming new words and often the simplest. For centuries we had the word political, but by loading the single letter a onto the front of it, a new word, apolitical, joined the language in 1952.
Still other words are formed by lopping off their ends. Mob, for example, is a shortened form of mobile vulgus (fickle crowd). Exam, gym, and lab are similar truncations, all of them dating only from the last century when syllabic amputations were the rage. Yet the impulse to shorten words is an ancient one.
Finally, but no less importantly, English possesses the ability to make new words by fusing compounds—airport, seashore, foot- wear, wristwatch, landmark, flowerpot, and so on almost end-lessly. All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, WHERE WORDS COME FROM
eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the ele-ments reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.
6.
PRONUNCIATION
WHAT IS THE MOST COMMON VOWEL
sound in English? Would you say it is the o of hot, the a of cat, the e of red, the i of in, the u of up? In fact, it is none of these. It isn't even a standard vowel sound. It is the colorless murmur of the schwa, represented by the symbol [a] and appearing as one or more of the vowel sounds in words without number. It is the sound of i in animal, of e in enough, of the middle o in orthodox, of the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth vowels in inspirational, and of at least one of the vowels in almost every multisyllabic word in the language. It is everywhere.
This reliance of ours on one drab phoneme is a little odd when you consider that English contains as lush a mixture of phonics as any language in the world. We may think we're pretty tame when we encounter such tongue twisters as the Czech vrch pin mlh (meaning "a hill in the fog") or Gaelic agglomerations like pwy ydych chi ( Welsh for "how are you?"), but on the other
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