Timeline for Pattern to Old English verbs-of-making-adjective?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 22, 2022 at 0:00 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Nov 21, 2022 at 21:28 | answer | added | TaliesinMerlin | timeline score: 5 | |
| Nov 21, 2022 at 21:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackEnglish/status/1594797806270570496 | ||
| Nov 21, 2022 at 20:49 | comment | added | Quuxplusone | @herisson: Verbed color names and "-en" does indeed seem to confirm my new-in-the-comments theory that the -en attaches to words ending in "hard consonants." The only anything-more in this question is "is there a reason for antonyms to differ in their final sounds?", which is probably unanswerable, but one never knows... | |
| Nov 21, 2022 at 20:38 | comment | added | herisson | Hi, do the answers to the previous question Verbed color names and "-en" help? Is there anything more that you'd like to see covered? | |
| Nov 21, 2022 at 18:53 | comment | added | John Lawler | The causative/inchoative -en is not productive any more, which means that it's degraded to a derivational suffix, not an inflectional one. Derivations like -dom or -hood only attach to certain words (*brotherdom, *candlehood) because those words have been common. | |
| Nov 21, 2022 at 18:17 | comment | added | Lambie | @Quuxplusone Yeah, I copied the wrong one from Wikipedia, for sure. | |
| Nov 21, 2022 at 17:31 | history | edited | Quuxplusone | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 20 characters in body
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| Nov 21, 2022 at 17:22 | comment | added | Quuxplusone | @Lambie: FWIW, I'm pretty sure your adjective-from-noun -en (wooden, silken) is different from this question's verb-from-adjective -en (blacken, sharpen). John's "inchoative suffix" sounds right to me. Also different: pluralizing -en (oxen, brethren). There are only so many sounds to go around, so we shouldn't be surprised that some common affixes have multiple unrelated purposes. :) | |
| Nov 21, 2022 at 17:09 | comment | added | Quuxplusone | @JohnLawler: But why to one of a pair and not the other? I guess now I'm also seeing a pattern to the final consonants: -k, -d, -t, -p, -f (-gh) can take -en, but -m -n -w can't. The pairs fitting the pattern are "just" the ones where one antonym ends with -k, -d, -t, -p, -f, and the other antonym ends with -m -n -w? And that pattern is just confirmation bias, or is there a reason for antonyms to differ in their final sounds? | |
| Nov 21, 2022 at 17:00 | comment | added | John Lawler | -en is an old causative/inchoative suffix. It's not productive any more. Applied mostly to statives and referred to their changes. | |
| Nov 21, 2022 at 16:55 | comment | added | Lambie | en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-en#Suffix_3 From Middle English -en, from Old English -en, from Proto-Germanic *-īnaz; suffix meaning "made of, consisting of, having the qualities of" applied to nouns to form adjectives. Akin to Dutch -en, German -en, Icelandic -inn, Latin -īnus. See -ine. | |
| Nov 21, 2022 at 16:05 | comment | added | Yosef Baskin | High points for owning confirmation bias, even if not the main player here. | |
| Nov 21, 2022 at 15:58 | history | asked | Quuxplusone | CC BY-SA 4.0 |