Timeline for Meaningless s- and f-?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 10, 2013 at 2:35 | answer | added | The Eternal Scribe | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 7, 2013 at 21:28 | review | Close votes | |||
| Nov 8, 2013 at 15:16 | |||||
| Nov 7, 2013 at 21:03 | answer | added | user55789 | timeline score: 0 | |
| Oct 30, 2013 at 0:23 | comment | added | Mitch | s and f are not meaningless productive prefixes in English. Look at all your examples. Check their etymologies in etymonline. Do the words have the same meaning? Of course not. Would you ask the same thing of bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat, and at? There's no pattern here. Please do some research -and- some thought before asking questions. Your questions are all interesting at first glance but make sure they pass the 'research and thought' test before posting. | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 23:39 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Tim, even reconstructive linguistics do not always agree on which roots have or do not have s-mobile tendencies—there is little real way of knowing. If Etymonline gives the word as being from an original root that has an initial s in parentheses (as in the case of ‘slight’: “from root *(s)lei- "slimy" (see slime (n.))” for example), that’s a good indication that this is a root that is commonly assumed to have an s-mobile. In the case of *(s)lei-, this is based on the fact that Sanskrit (who would normally have *sl- > *sr-) here has l, and that Irish has both sligim and lenim. | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 23:33 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @BraddSzonye, it’s quite hard to tell if it is really an s-mobile or not, but the thing that makes it look like it might not be is that all the languages that have reflexes without the s are languages where there wouldn’t be an s even if there was one in the original form because those languages (like Latin and Greek) regularly lost s before l in initial position in all words. S-mobile is something that would already in the proto-language have been optional, sometimes there, sometimes not—but in these roots, even if the s was always there, it would still disappear in, say, Latin/Greek. | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 21:22 | comment | added | B. Szonye | Interesting that the Wikipedia article gives slack as an example that is probably not s-mobile. Unfortunately, I'm not well-versed enough in linguistics to understand what makes it an exception. | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 20:28 | comment | added | Tim | @JanusBahsJacquet: Thanks! How can I know if a word started with s has such prefix s- or not? I didn't see etymonline mentions this. For example, slate, slight. | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 20:06 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Tim, I missed the bit where your question says, “but may have related or different meanings”. With different meanings, it’s often just coincidences. You can find examples of that with almost any initial letter—‘crate’, ‘grate’, ‘irate’, and ‘rate’ are all words, but they are not related just because they all happen to be the same apart from the presence or quality of the first sound. | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 20:04 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Kevin, I do believe that must be the most common car name within the (admittedly small) community of scholars of Indo-European linguistics. (Personally I don’t drive, so I’m not really eligible) | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 20:02 | comment | added | Kevin | @JanusBahsJacquet I may have to name my next car S-Mobile now. | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 20:00 | comment | added | terdon | @Tim each of these examples is a word without the f but a very different one, flock ≠ lock, flatter ≠ latter etc. Oh and an example in a similar vein which uses a vowel is fear and ear but, again, these are very different words. I think your point about s is very interesting but does not extend to f. | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 18:46 | comment | added | Tim | flock, flatter, flaw, flag, .... Besides s- and f-, there seem to be other similar "prefixes", but I can't recall them right now. Is it correct that following these "prefix", there is always another consonant instead of a vowal? | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 18:41 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | There are quite a few Indo-European roots that appear either with or without a prefixed s. This s is called s-mobile. I can’t think of any similar thing with f, though. Could you give some examples? (There is a regular correspondence between inherited English words that begin with f and borrowings from Celtic languages that begin with nothing; but that is simply because /p/ was lost in Celtic) | |
| Oct 29, 2013 at 18:38 | history | asked | Tim | CC BY-SA 3.0 |