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the word televise is a back-formation of television; The process is motivated by analogy: edit is to editor as act is to actor. This process leads to a lot of denominal verbs. The productivity of back-formation is limited, with the most productive forms of back-formation being hypocoristics. [5]
They are also often loosely called roots because they are ancient and have a basic role in word formation, but functionally and often structurally they are distinct from roots proper: the -graph in autograph is both a root and a classical combining form, while the -graphy in cryptography consists of root -graph-and suffix -y, and is only a ...
The origin of any particular word is also known as its etymology. For languages with a long written history , etymologists make use of texts, particularly texts about the language itself, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in meaning and form , or when and how they entered the language.
The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). The distinction between ...
The word's true origin is unknown, but it existed in the Middle Scots period. [32] [33] News: The word news has been claimed to be an acronym of the four cardinal directions (north, east, west, and south). However, old spellings of the word varied widely (e.g., newesse, newis, nevis, neus, newys, niewes, newis, nues, etc.).
The term folk etymology is a loan translation from German Volksetymologie, coined by Ernst Förstemann in 1852. [6] Folk etymology is a productive process in historical linguistics, language change, and social interaction. [7] Reanalysis of a word's history or original form can affect its spelling, pronunciation, or meaning.
Rebracketing is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new etymology becomes the conventional norm. The name false splitting , also called misdivision , in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle ...
In English, verbification typically involves simple conversion of a non-verb to a verb. The verbs to verbify and to verb, the first by derivation with an affix and the second by zero derivation, are themselves products of verbification (see autological word), and, as might be guessed, the term to verb is often used more specifically, to refer only to verbification that does not involve a ...