Skip to main content

Home/ Words R Us/ Group items tagged suffixes

Rss Feed Group items tagged

urielsung18

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170310183146.htm - 0 views

  •  
    Researchers have found that English has seemed to organize itself based on spelling on its own. The four suffixes (-ous like in hazardous, -ic like in allergic, -al like in final and -y like in funny) have had consistent spellings over time. Researchers looked back at samples from around 1000 years ago and found that certain suffixes won over another spelling.
  •  
    Stony Brook University recently discovered that the history and spelling of suffixes of English words is more orderly and organized than previously thought. This research is now being expanded with more tests on English speakers being able to learn to read more quickly, more consistently, and more fluently.
Ryan Catalani

"Not to Put Too Fine a Point Upon It": How Dickens Helped Shape the Lexicon : Word Rout... - 1 views

  •  
    "Of the Dickens citations in the OED, 258 citations are the earliest recorded by the dictionary for a particular word, and 1,586 are the earliest for a particular sense of a word. Dickens was certainly an innovative writer, but these examples are not necessarily his own coinages. ... Very often the words that Dickens ushered in were from the earthy slang associated with the working class, the theatre, or the criminal underworld, and Dickens did much to make these once "vulgar" words mainstream. Dickens's very first novel, The Pickwick Papers from 1837, introduced such slang terms as butter-fingers ("a clumsy person"), flummox ("bewilder"), sawbones ("surgeon"), and whizz-bang ("sound of a gunshot"). ... One way that Dickens devised new words was by adding suffixes to old ones. He made good use of the -y suffix to make adjectives (mildewy, bulgy, swishy, soupy, waxy, trembly) and -iness to make nouns (messiness, cheesiness, fluffiness, seediness). ... Finally, no discussion of Dickensian language would be complete without mentioning the richly evocative names of his characters."
Lara Cowell

Can Latin Help Younger Students Build Vocabulary? - 4 views

  •  
    According to Timothy Rasinski, a literacy education professor at Kent State, teaching young students about morphology (the study of word forms) and word patterns improves their ability to gain meaning from unfamiliar words, which helps with reading overall.
magellan001352

Creating an Alien Language for your Manuscript - 0 views

  •  
    This article talked about basic rules and structures in creating your own language. For example in creating your own language, you have to consider nouns, verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. You need to first start with verbs in the infinitive form and then structurally conjugate them with prefixes or suffixes. This article was interesting and all, but I was sort of looking for how to create your own language. This article seemed to talk about how Aliens would talk in the english language.
Lara Cowell

Neologisms - 0 views

  •  
    Neologisms are words that've newly entered language. This article contains links to several articles on the phenomenon, including how new words become real words, How language is made and why it grows, emerging prefixes and suffixes, and the survival probability of 10 newly coined words.
Lara Cowell

Language Log: Shooketh, rattleth, and rolleth - 0 views

  •  
    Linguist Victor Mair references Caleb Madison's article in the "The Good Word" column of The Atlantic (1/24/22): "Why We're All Shooketh: The term is online slang of Biblical proportions". The phrase I'm shooketh was first uttered by the comedian Christine Sydelko in a YouTube video uploaded to her account in 2017 (she was expressing her shock at having been recognized by a fan at Boston Market). The adjective shooketh took off as a way to lend biblical proportions to awestruck confusion. But the linguistic journey to its creation spans the evolution of the English language, connecting Early Modern English, turn-of-the-century adventure novels, and Twitter slang. In the original article, Madison noted that when we want to transform verbs like shake into adjectives, we typically use something called a participle, either present or past. The present participle of shake is shaking, as in "I'm shaking." The past participle would be "I'm shaken." But in the 19th century, the simple past tense, shook, took hold. As for the "eth" part, Mair notes that this suffix was used in Early Modern English (think Shakespeare and the King James Bible) to put verbs in the third-person present tense, e.g. "she loveth." Soon, -eth simplified to just -s, but we still use the form when we need to give our verbs a little extra ancient oomph. It just wouldn't be as momentous to say "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away!" And it certainly wouldn't be as cool to say "I'm shooks." But our distance from the Elizabethan era allows -eth to reappear with no tense tension. Instead, it simply adds a wry dramatic flourish to the feeling of being shook. If using shook dials the shock of shaken up a notch, adding -eth pushes the intensity to 11, expressing a holy and almost sublime desire in the face of inexplicable events. Shooketh yokes together a punchy modern verbal innovation with a dramatic formal relic of early English to communicate a shaking of biblical propor
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20 items per page