Re: confession: roots

Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>On Fri, 4 May 2001 14:39:01 -0500, Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>
>wrote:
>
> >Okay, I confess, I *really* don't understand roots.  I understand that
> >languages evolve from earlier languages, but my understanding of a root
>is
> >that it is not a useable word, just a sliver of meaning, and how the hell
> >did that ever evolve?  Or is a root just the earlier word stripped of its
> >grammar?
> >
> >So, like, the roots for "philosopher" are philo- and soph-, but the words
> >they come from are "philia" and "sophia."
>
>In our IE languages, and seemingly the Semitic languages too, and probably
>lots of langs all over, the roots are _underlying_. The underlying root
>there would appear to be "phil" and "soph", though I disclaim further
>knowledge of Greek roots.
>
>Someone said we could say that roots are mostly something linguists have
>invented to help analyze morphological structures. That's true, in the same
>sense that phonemes are invented by linguists; they are nonetheless quite
>functional at the underlying level in our languages.
>
>The existence of roots seems simple enought to me; they are the bricks in
>our lexical structuring. As to how roots-that-don't-surface evolve, I'd
>guess the original word goes obsolete (diving to the underlying level)
>after a fruitful career of spouting out derivatives. As long as the rules
>of derivation remain stable, the root remains at the underlying level
>through the power of its surface derivations. When the rules of derivations
>change, however, and the lexical structure is reordered en masse, the
>origin of the derivatives may become unclear to the extent that the old
>underlying root is lost completely.
>
>"The life and times of a lexical root..." ;)
>
>I may be wrong, but English has always seemed to me to be less root-
>conscious than some other langs, such as my native language. Please take
>that as a very descriptive hypothesis; I don't claim for extensive root-
>systems to be inherently superior.
>
>So I'll take an example of an Icelandic root and its surface forms:
>
>/far/  (semantically associated with movement of various sorts; cognate
>         of English 'fare')
>
>fara (vb)    go
>ferð (n)     voyage, trip
>ferðast (vb) travel
>ferill (n)   path of movement; career, life-path
>ferli (n)    process
>far (n)      mark, (im)print ("fingrafar" = finger print)
>far (n)      vessel, vehicle
>
>There the root does surface in two different noun forms. However, my
>Icelandic mind does not feel those words to be representative of the root
>itself; and that's not just my linguistic opinion, it's my "feeling" of the
>language.
>
>Now, those were just derivatives of the main root /far/; the wonder of
>Indo-
>European ablauts brings us, meanwhile, a root that is subordinate to the
>main root: /fOur/, "fór". It surfaces in the past tense paradigm of the
>verb "fara", and in various umlauted derivatives (compare, btw, the
>relationship between the roots "sing" and "sang" in English):
>
>færa (vb)    move (transitive)
>færni (n)    capability, ability
>færi (n)     opportunity; tool
>færð (n)     conditions for movement
>fær (adj)    capable, able
>færsla (n)   "action", only in banking and accounting
>
>Finally, there's the root /fjar/ (cognate of English 'far') which is almost
>certainly related to /far/, but much less subordinate to it:
>
>fjarri (adj)  far away
>fjara (n)     low-tide (sea)
>fjarski (n)   far away place
>fjörður (n)   fjord/firth
>fjara (v)     run short, lose
>fjör (n)      (archaic) life; (modern) fun
>
>And I'm not going into composed words...
We should perhaps add that the word root is often used for things that once
worked like Oskar describes, but nowadays is only recognized as such by
diachronic linguistics. For example, PIEists (/pai.ists/!) will tell you
that 'guest' and 'hostile' is derived from the same PIE root (*ghost-
"foreign" I think), but the average modern English-speaker certainly feels
the two words to be completely unrelated.

                                                   Andreas
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Reply