Re: Insane Question

Sarah Marie Parker-Allen wrote:

>Why does "ceiling" rhyme with "feeling"?  I find myself confused by "ing" as
>an ending (gah, there it is again); why do so many words end with it and is
>there a catalogue of the various ways that they're allowed to?
>
It's basically the present participle- and gerund-former and a
nominaliser, I do believe. It generally fixes itself onto verbs, though
one can't *ceil, 'tis true. (If you don't know what these terms mean,
take a look through
<http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Index.htm>.)

>It's bad enough that
>"hesitation" and "imagination" rhyme (and I don't know the grammatical term
>for that kind of word, either -- all the "ations" out there, I mean), but
>"ing" is the thing that's bugging me at the moment.
>
-ion is another nominaliser, this time from Latin. -atus was the Latin
past-participle suffix (like English -ed or sometimes -(e)n), and for
some reason, when verbs were borrowed from Latin, we tended to take an
anglicised form of the past participle as our root. It's just the suffix
that gets added...

>unless you go ahead and make every word constructed in the same
>way as the "ings" and "ations" are [so they'll all rhyme regardless of the
>root word or the particular sound]
>
I beg to differ: 'killing' and 'throwing' don't rhyme. 'Stealing' and
'feeling' only rhyme by grace of the root. (The same does not apply to
-ations though.)

>Meanwhile, I'm going to try and find a place that will list all the "lys"
>out there (or rather, ways that words are allowed to end with them, and the
>rules to accompany them).  That should be easy, I'm pretty sure it's just an
>adverb thing.
>
Yep, basically. Most good-natured adjectives will form an adverb by
addition of the -ly suffix. A couple of evil ones, like 'good', refuse
to. And while a lot of words ending in -ly are adverbs formed from
good-natured adjectives, some especially evil words, like 'family', are
out to confuse us... (I knew families never were a good idea...)

I suggest you go find yourself a grammar of English (or a book on
English usage). They'll probably tell you a lot better than I ever could.

>
>
Tristan.

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