Re: The suffix -hood, was Re: Dictionaries of agglutinating languages

----- Original Message -----
From: "Amanda Babcock" <langs@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2000 7:39 AM
Subject: The suffix -hood, was Re: Dictionaries of agglutinating languages


> On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, dirk elzinga wrote:
>
> > But not always accurate. A favorite example I give to my students when
> > the subject of derivation comes up is the suffix -hood in English. It
> > attaches to nouns to create abstract nouns meaning something like 'the
> > property of being an X'. Thus, father -> fatherhood; knight ->
> > knighthood, etc. However, it won't work with all nouns: candle ->
> > *candlehood (although one could imagine what that might mean).
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that -hood only works on words
> which satisfy the criterion "something which a person or people can be".
> I got a quick and dirty list of -hood words by grepping /usr/dict/words,
> and here they are:
>
> adulthood
> babyhood
> boyhood
> brotherhood
> childhood
> falsehood
> manhood
> motherhood
> nationhood
> parenthood
> peasanthood
> sainthood
> squirehood
> widowhood
> womanhood
>
> All but two are built on a noun which describes a kind of person.  Of the
> remaining two, falsehood and nationhood, falsehood is built on an
> adjective which can apply to a person (although I admit I'm not sure that
> is the sense of 'false' which is being used here), and nationhood is built
> on a noun which describes a group of people.
>
> This is obviously not an exhaustive list.  Can anybody come up with more
> counterexamples beyond "falsehood"?
>
> > And there are nouns which don't conform to the "regular" pattern:
> > neighbor -> neighborhood (does *not* mean 'property of being a
> > neighbor').
>
> This is true.  However, many of these -hood words have secondary meanings
> parallel to neighborhood, if you interpret neighborhood as "a collection
> of neighbors".  Womanhood and knighthood can mean "womankind" and "knights
> as a class or body", respectively.  Brotherhood and priesthood can mean a
> particular collection of brothers or priests.  Maybe neighborhood had a
> secondary meaning such as the these, which then became its primary
> meaning.
>
> Amanda
> Ecstatic that the t-shirt is back!  Although I really liked "your language
> here".