New answers tagged suffixes
11
To be more precise, the English word Eleusinian can be traced to the ancient Greek Ἐλευσίς which becomes Ἐλευσῖνος in the genitive and provides the -in- in Eleusinian. Ἐλευσίς is a place name (Ελευσίνα in modern Greek) and since the mysteries are the mysteries of Eleysis, in Greek the genitive is used so they are the mysteries of Ἐλευσῖνος => Eleusinian.
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6
According to American Heritage and Random House, Eleusinian is from Latin Eleusīni(us) “of Eleusis,” which is in turn from Greek Eleusinios. The stem change doesn't indicate any special meaning; that's simply how it appears in the source languages. (As terdon notes, it's from the genitive inflection of the name.)
Eleusian does not appear in dictionaries, ...
2
From Chambers Dictionary:
“-ite” is a suffix used to “form names of people, indicating their origin, place of origin, affiliations, loyalties” (e.g. Jacobite). Whereas suffixes “-an” or “–ian” denotes “things belong to or typical of a specific person” (e.g. Johnsonian).
I couldn't find anything on -ist. They generally all mean the same thing though and ...
-1
Like many idioms with little historical depth, the use of -fu has more to do with cultural themes than grammatical construction and meaning. The pseudo-word "Spring-fu" is a construction meant to allegorically refer to kung-fu that endows the scripting language Spring with the mysticism and complexity of a martial art --- something that requires dedication ...
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