English has more than a hundred common prefixes and suffixes -able,
anti-, and so on—and with these it can form and reform words
with a facility that yet again sets it apart from other tongues. For example, we
can take the French word mutin (rebellion) and turn it into mutiny, mutinous,
mutinously, mutineer, and many others, while the French have still just the one
form, mutin.
We are astonishingly indiscriminate in how we form our cornpounds, sometimes
adding an Anglo-Saxon prefix or suffix to a Greek or Latin root (plainness,
sympathizer), and sometimes vice versa (readable, disbelieve). [Examples cited
by Burchfield, . This inclination to use affixes
and infixes provides gratifying flexibility in creating or modifying words to fitnew uses, as strikingly demonstrated in the word incomprehensibility, which
consists of the root hen and eight affixes and infixes: in, corn, pre, s, ib, il, it, and
-y. Even more melodic is the musical term quasihemidemisemiquaver, which
describes a note that is equal to 128th of a semibreve.
As well as showing flexibility it also promotes confusion. We have six ways of
making labyrinth into an adjective: labyrinthian, labyrinthean, labyrinthal,
labyrinthine, labyrinthic, and labyrinthical. We have at least six ways of
expressing negation with prefixes: a-, anti-, in-, im-, it-, un-, and non-. It is
arguable whether this is a sign of admirable variety or just untidiness. It must be
exasperating for foreigners to have to learn that a thing unseen is not unvisible,
but invisible, while something that cannot be reversed is not inreversible but
irreversible and that a thing not possible is not nonpossible or antipossible but
impossible. Further-more, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of
assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is
necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always implies negation
but not with invaluable, while -less is equally negative, as a rule, but not with
priceless. Things are so confusing that even native users have shown signs of
mental fatigue and left us with two forms meaning the same thing: flammable
and in-flammable, iterate and reiterate, ebriate and inebriate, habitable and
inhabitable, durable and perdurable, fervid and perfervid, gather and forgather,
ravel and unravel.
Some of our word endings are surprisingly rare. If you think of angry and
hungry, you might conclude that -gry is a common ending, but in fact it occurs in
no other common words in English.
Similarly -dous appears in only stupendous, horrendous, tremendous, 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 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 300 years old.
Nor is there any discernible pattern to help explain why a particular affix
attaches itself to a particular word or why some creations 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?
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 endlessly. 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, eschewing
the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing
the nifty refinement of making the elements 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.