Question!

[conuly]

Why don't some words have logical opposites? We have unruly and ruthless, but one can't be ruly or ruth (okay, that word DOES exist, it means mercy, but it's obsolete). Very few people use the word canny (just me, as far as I can tell, and only around family).

Or what about words that shouldn't have opposites, but should exist, like gress (progress, ingress, egress, regress, agressive, digress, congress....) meaning... um... okay, I know I could just look up the Latin, but let's say it means "go". I like go. It's a fun game. Or movement! It's a fun movement too!

Or what about whelm? That's a real word. It means to turn over dirt or somesuch. Why do we no longer whelm the garden?

*sighs*

Well, there's my plan for the next year. Introduce new-old words back into the English language, via carefully removing prefixes.

Comments

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Why don't some words have logical opposites? We have unruly and ruthless, but one can't be ruly or ruth (okay, that word DOES exist, it means mercy, but it's obsolete). Very few people use the word canny (just me, as far as I can tell, and only around family).

First of, the logical opposite of ruthless would have to be ruthful; since ruthless is an adjective derived from the noun ruth by application of the suffix -less, ruth is not the opposite, but the stem.

Then there's other funny stuff from the realm of morphology, such as allomorphs. Allomorphs are morphemes (=elements that words are made up from and that recur) that don't have their own meaning in the English language - such as re-, per-, con-, de- etc, or -ceive, -gress, -mit etc. In Latin, where these exampels come from, they all have their own meaning (re- = back, per- = by means of/ through, con- from cum = with, de- = (away) from; -ceive from capere = take/ grasp/ catch, -gress from gradi = go, -mit from mittere = send, let go, allow), but in English, they work only in combination with other allomorphs. That's because when these words were adapted to English, only the compounds of the original Latin stems were taken, not the stems. Probably the reason for that is that there were English synonyms for the stems, but not for the compounds: There is already an English word for "go", obviously, so there was no need for gradi; however, most likely there was no word carrying the exact meaning of progress, so it was adapted.

As for pretty words turning obsolete, blame the speakers...

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Argh. Sorry about the "allomorph" thing; it's, of course, formatives, not allomorphs. Allomorphs would be -ceive and -cept- (perceive/perception). Aaaah.

As if I weren't already worried enough about my linguistics exam, now I start mixing up what little stuff I had in my head. Not good. So not good.

[conuly]

1. Yes, you're right, my bad. I typed this up in the heat of the moment, and did not have time to make sure I was using words accurately.
2. Well, I did say I wasn't going to bother going back to Latin :) I prefer gress to gradi, anyway. AND I prefer it to go. So, hmph, I can use it if I please :)

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Of course you can ;) Strictly speaking, gress is the perfect form (as in past and present perfect, not as in ideal) of gradi; but most people will be confused either way, whether you say "Why don't we gress to the cinema" or "Why don't we grade to the cinema" henceforth (yet another pretty, almost obsolete word!), so you can as well pick what you like best...