17 February 2013

All That Junk: The Afterlife of Broken Morphemes


The lexicon is full of elements which were once entirely functional morphemes but which for various reasons – most often the destructive effects of sound change – have become defective and eventually useless. They still get replicated and passed on from generation to generation simply because we acquire our mother tongue (or learn a foreign language) whole, without testing the functionality of every little detail and without repairing those that might seem to have been broken. Linguistic communication involves a lot of redundancy, so a small local loss is easy to tolerate: other elements will take over the function of the damaged one.

For example, the suffix -th, forming deadjectival nouns in early English, is now practically dead. We are still able to detect its presence in words like length, strength, warmth, breadth, width, etc., but the process that formed these words (in a very distant past) is no longer productive, as opposed, for example, to the formation of nouns in -ness. We can say awsomeness, weirdness, and coolness (and interpret such words correctly even in the unlikely case that we have encountered them for the first time), but not “awsometh”, “weirdth”, or “coolth”. We do not understand today why the vowel od length and strength should be /e/ (rather than /ɒ/, as in long and strong), why we say /wɪdθ/ rather than /waɪdθ/, or why, on the other hand, there is no need to modify the vowel of warm to get warmth. Is youth related to young? The spelling is similar and suggestive of a relationship, but how exactly they might be related is a mystery (unless you happen to be a linguistic expert paid for knowing such things).

In Old English the suffix was still quite productive. Also the process of i-umlaut, responsible for the fronting of the vowel of length, strength, and breadth, had not yet degenerated into an obscure fossil remain but was still utilised to some extent as a morphological device. Consider  OE fūl ‘dirty, polluted’. The suffix , when added to it, caused the vowel to become front (though still pronounced with rounded lips, like German ü or French u): the OE spelling was fȳlþ (phonetically /fyːlθ/). Whence the fronting? If you look at the corresponding Old High German noun, fūlida, the reason becomes clear: the suffix once contained an *i, lost in the pre-literary history of English, but not before it had exerted its assimilatory effect on the preceding syllable. In Old English, the addition of the suffix and the accompanying vowel change functioned together as a complex marker indicating a noun derived from an adjective (note the redundancy of such double marking, given up in the case of warmth).

What happened later? Long /yː/ was regularly shortened when it was followed by a consonant cluster (this is also the reason why we have short vowels in depth, breadth and width), and by the end of Middle English the resulting /y/ had become unrounded, merging with short /i/. The modern outcome is filth /fɪlθ/. Meanwhile, the long vowel of fūl developed regularly, becoming a diphthong in the fifteenth century as a result of the Great Vowel Shift. The outcome is ModE foul /faʊl/. Both words are short, and whatever similarity has remained between them hardly compels one to believe that they must be related. In fact, any fully competent speaker of Modern English asked to form a noun from foul will likely suggest foulness – partly because filth, liberated from its original obligations, has shifted its meaning from simply ‘dirtiness’ to ‘disgusting stuff’. We no longer break a word like filth into meaningful smaller parts. Filth is now unanalysable, and the final -th is not recognised for what it used to be. It has become junk.

Some of it will be recycled
Junk morphology may be compared to “junk DNA” – the sequences in the genome that have lost their original “meaning”. The genome is littered with the slowly decaying débris of once-functional sequences:  former genes (now pseudogenes) damaged by a mutation that has rendered them incapable of coding for a protein, retroviruses that have been infecting the ancestors of modern organisms over tens of millions of years, and after integrating their code with the host’s DNA lost their ability to break free and go on infecting new cells... and all that junk. It survives because it accumulates faster than purifying selection is able to take effect. In other words, junk is relatively harmless, so it is not worthwhile to remove it quickly. It can even find a use again: occasionally a broken sequence can be co-opted in a novel function. As we shall see, the same is true of junk morphology. But this is something to be continued in future posts.

30 comments:

  1. Isn't it 'awesome'? Anyway, -th as a ordinal-number formant is alive (I am not saying that it be the same suffix): zeroth (this word does exist).

    What about -hood? I seem to have seen new words formed therewith, I can't recall what they were, though.

    Or -dom, for that matter? 'I doubt X's linguisthood' --- an elaborate way of saying 'I doubt X's competence/standing as a linguist'.

    It would be interesting to ask linguistically naive English native (=naive) speakers if they are aware of the connection between 'foul' and 'filth'.

    There are examples of 'recycling old stuff' (junk) in other languages, e.g. in some variants of Dutch it is possible to append the (otherwise obligatory) -e ending of the weak adjective declension (in fact the only item that has remained of it) depending on meaning:

    een Frans schilder (a French painter)

    de Franse schilder (the French painter)

    but:

    de Frans schilder (the 'French', i.e. exhibiting certain French qualities, painter)


    (or something like it, I can't remember with 100 p.c. reliability)

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  2. 'fullida' may have existed in Old High German, but not in Modern High German afaik, nor can I think of the suffix corresponding to -th in that language (but it exists in Dutch: diepte, breedte, hoogte, lengte, and even vuilte, now obsolescent, more recent: vuilnis, filth).

    In German, this function is filled by -e (with umlaut), thus, Ho"he, La"nge, Breite, Fa"ule, rot, decay. Now what is funny is that this suffix (probably -i OHG) is quite frequent (Liebe G"ute, benevolence) and _marginally_ productive, in such semi-jocular words as 'Spreche' (not: 'Sprache', language), or 'Schreibe', manner of speaking or writing, in youth (<---geogth?, i. e. geong without the nasal infix 'n'?) jargon there are even more examples. Recycling old filth.

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    1. Ah, German 'JugenD' (youth) may (or may not) be an example of the German counterpart of -th?

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  3. Youth is an exact cognate of Jugend. The absence of a nasal in the former is due to a regular loss of nasals (with compensatory lengthening) before fricatives in the North Sea Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects. The PGmc. form was *juwunþiz, formed similarly to Lat. iuventus. The *-þi- suffix in this word reflects PIE *-ti- (as in Lat. mens, mentis) and is not etymologically the same as the *-iþō in filth, depth, etc., though it has a similar function.

    While we are at it, the n in young is not a nasal infix. But it's a long story, involving a vast word-family; I may devote a separate post to it.

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    1. juwunþiz ---> Jugend? This truly perplexeth me. Whence the 'g'? Can you give any details?

      In Dutch, it's 'jeugd', tho' the language of Vondel have but few examples of the nasal-deletion you're referring to, like vijf (five) or zacht (soft). At the moment I can't think of any others.

      In my youth (no pun intended) I read a poem by Vermander, the Dutch Vasari, that started with:

      Compt leer-lustighe jeught
      Wilt ghy grondigh verstaen
      D'edel vry schilderconst, daerdoor men wordt vermaerdt.

      With that advent of eager-to-learn young age you wish to thoroughly understand the noble free handicraft of a painter, through which you become famous.... (Vermander promissed in the sequel to explain the handicraft to the young person 'met wat ink en wat pen' --- they kept using up pens while writing..

      ... hence I remember the word.

      Returning to non-productive morphological filth: the prefix a- (alive, anew, again, abate, etc.) has many mixed origins in Old English; will you explain it too? Also, be- exists in English but (yes, in the word 'but' it's fossilised too) is not productive anymore (so it seems to me at least), whereas its German counterpart is extremely productive.

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    2. Oh dear, not everything at once :)

      juwunþiz ---> Jugend? This truly perplexeth me. Whence the 'g'? Can you give any details?

      PGmc. *g was actually a voiced fricative [ɣ] rather than a stop, and this pronunciation was still used in some positions (especially between vowels) in Proto-WGmc. and even in OE (e.g. dagas 'days' was pronounced ['dɑɣɑs]. [ɣ] and [w] are quite confusible, especially next to a rounded vowel (where [ɣ] may acquire some lip-rounding), hence the sporadic substitution of [ɣ] for [w] in West Germanic (or a subset thereof). For example PGmc. *newun- 'nine' (Goth. niun, OHG niun, ON níun) yielded Ingvaeonic *niɣun > OE nigon, OS, OFris. nigun. The same thing happened in *juwunþi- > *juɣunþ-, except that here the substitution is more generally WGmc. Note, however, Goth. junda (with a different suffix) < *jūndō < *juwundō (here *-dō < pre-Gmc. *-tā́).

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    3. P.S. In the transition from Old To Middle English intervocalic [ɣ] was regularly lenited into [w], as in boga > ME bowe 'bow'. That's how ġeoguþ ['juɣuθ] became ME yow(u)th > LME, Mod.E youth (/juː/ was not affected by the Great Vowel Shift).

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    4. Can we relate the -k in Polish junak by Verner's Law? Do we have any other cognate in Polish? Maybe Pol. jurny? Would -r- be a suffix then?

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    5. The jun- part is distantly related (see also OCS junъ, Lith. jáunas), but the suffix -ak- is Slavic, not IE. Also the vowel grade is different in Balto-Slavic. More direct cognates include Skt. yuvaśá- 'young' (an exact correspondence, also semantically) and Lat. iuvencus 'young bullock, young man'.

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    6. I thought it was IE because there are similar suffixes also in Baltic and Hellenic: Lith. naujõkas 'novice' , Grk νέαξ 'young man', Slavic (as in Polish junak) and now Germanic (E young).

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    7. Balto-Slavic *-āka- (whatever its IE connections) can't be the same as IE *-k̑o- (note the satem development in Sanskrit and the absence of a vowel before the stop).

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    8. I see. I find the topic of this post very stimulating. I am interested in Polish- English cognates and I often find such broken morphemes; for example, if we compare E wind and Pol. wiatr, the words mean the same and descend from a common PIE root, present also in Pol. wiać 'blow', but were formed by different (and no longer productive) derivational processes. The -tr in Polish looks like such a broken morpheme (we also have piętro, jesiotr ‘sturgeon’ and possibly wątroba 'liver' - derived from PIE en 'in'). Would you agree?

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    9. The /tr/ in Slavic *větrъ looks like an isolated survival of the agent suffix *-t(o)r-, shifted to the thematic declension like the 'brother' word (*bratrъ). Otherwise we only find Slavic *-tel- in this function. So the original form would have been *h2wéh1-tōr/-tr- 'blower'. Germanic (like Latin) has a substantivised adjective derived from the active participle in *-nt-, *h2weh1-n̥t-ó-. A similar form (but with initial accent) is reflected in Skt. vā́ta (which sometimes scans as trisyllabic, vá.ata-, in the Rigveda).

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  4. ' [ɣ] and [w] are quite confusible, especially next to a rounded vowel (where [ɣ] may acquire some lip-rounding), hence the sporadic substitution of [ɣ] for [w] in West Germanic (or a subset thereof). For example PGmc. *newun- 'nine' (Goth. niun, OHG niun, ON níun) yielded Ingvaeonic *niɣun > OE nigon, OS, OFris. nigun.'

    They are confusible enough, but mostly 'w' wins out, if your story is true, Jugend and Dutch negen would be the only examples of 'g's prevailing known to me. The Grimm bros had a different explanation for both words, http://dwb.uni-trier.de/de/, maybe they are just outdated, for 'neun' they held that j (rather than w) became g. If such a shift be any more frequent I don't know. But examples like boga-->bow, dagan-->dawn and the like loom large, they eclipse (at least in my non-expert mind) the very possibility of w-->g.

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  5. Well, there are languages in which *w > *g has been a regular sound change (Armenian is an obvious example). If two sounds are confusible, confusion may occur bidirectionally even if one direction is generally preferred. For example, we usually have θ > f (th-fronthing) in dialectal English, but there are quite a few speakers who pronounce trough as "troth" rather than "troff". In Middle English we often have x > f after a back vowel (Mod.E laugh, enough, rough, etc.), while Dutch and Low German have ft > xt in a similar context, as in lucht 'air'.

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    1. '*w > *g has been a regular sound change (Armenian is an obvious example)'

      Yes! But Armenian is a generally 'eccentric' language, widely known for most unusual changes, making 'duwo' 'erker' and such-like. In the Germanic family, the step from labial to velar seems somehow counterintuitive to me... sorry 'bout that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the backer the consonant is, the more difficult it is to pronounce, so the quite big step from w to g appears less likely than from j to g. (jj-->gg in Norse, and a second round of it in Faroese, ey-->oggja, island). The Dutch shift ft-->cht I would explain by the mitigating influence of 't' which as in-between and half-way-through between f and ch.

      Danish is famous for this type of shift, yet even there it was to the front of the mouth, so 'dag' (with a velar fricative) is today virtually indistinguishable from its English synonym (and sometimes too lives on as 'Dow'(-Jones)).

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    2. Troth < trough is surely a hypercorrection, given that there is no support for the spelling. I hear it here in the U.S. among white Southerners who are making sure they are not mistaken for African Americans, who have pretty generally /-θ/ > /-f/, sometimes remaining as a signal of identification even in otherwise highly acrolectal varieties.

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    3. Actually, there is some small degree of support from the spelling, given that quite a few instances of gh are pronounced /f/ in words used more frequently than trough by the general population (cough, enough, laugh, laughter, [UK] draught). I agree that hupercorrection is a likely motivation in some cases, but the /θ/ in trough is not limited to the South. Here is what Edger Sturtevant's self-report (Introduction to Linguistic Science, 1947, p. 148):

      -----

      During my first thirty years I always pronounced trough [trɔθ] and supposed thet to be the universal pronunciation. Then I saw the word in a printed list of words having gh for f. I recorded this error of mine in Linguistic Change, p. 34, along with the comment that I could not have made it if the word had not had an ambiguous spelling. In due course an aunt, who had been a member of my father's family during my childhood, read this passage and exclaimed: "Why! I always say troth!" I promptly assumed that I had learned the word from her. But Map 208 in the Linguistic Atlas of New England shows that [θ] is the usual final consonant of trough in Connecticut, whence my father's family migrated to Illinois, and that the same final consonant prevails in southwestern Maine, where my mother spent her childhood. Probably in my early years I never heard any other pronunciation than [trɔθ]. According to the most recent Webster, "the dialectal pronunciation troth is widespread in America, and known in England."

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  6. Then Welsh is also eccentric (initial *w > gʷ), and so is Germanic (Holtzmann's Law: *-ww- > -ggw- in Gothic and Scandinavian). Some instances of *w > *g are even older than Grimm's Law, cf. *daiwer- 'brother-in-law' > PGmc. *taikura- (OE tācor, OHG zeihhur). It's hard to imagine that *w became *k directly, but a change like *w > *ɣ > *g > *k (Grimm) is entirely plausible.

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    1. And from another area altogether there’s the Italian variant Pagola of Paola.

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    2. There are also very similar changes in Romanian (nebula- > negură, favu- > fag 'honeycomb', naevu- > neg 'wart'). Interestingly, the change of intervocalic -v/b- to Romanian -g- happened when the second vowel was /u/.

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    3. FWIW examples of *w to a voiceless velar stop also can be found whenever there's no *g getting in the way. Among the Samoyedic languages, Selkup has a change of word-initial *w to *kʷ, which later can become /k/, /ku/, /q/ depending on the dialect and the following vowel.

      Selkup also has a development *j > *kʲ > /tʃ/, /k/, /q/. It seems possible the pathway here was epenthesis of [k] rather than a fortition chain *w > *ɣʷ > *xʷ/gʷ > *kʷ. I've seen a similar mechanism posited for, IIRC, one of the Algonquian languages.

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    4. There are also several Northwest Coast American Indian languages in which a similar process took place: Northern Straits and Klallam (both Coast Salishan), Makah (Wakashan), and Chemakum (Chimakuan), according to Campbell (2000). In all of them *w > /kʷ/, and *j > /tʃ/.

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    5. And we don't even have to travel that far from Germanic. Two points (number 7 and 8 located on the Northwest coast of Brittany) in the new Breton dialect atlas show a development of /u.V/ to [ukwV] or [ugwV] and of /i.V/ to [icV] or [iJV] (/J/ here being the voiced counterpart of /c/).

      So frouezh 'fruit' gives [frukwes], houarn 'iron' [ukwarn], [ugOrn], bihan 'little' [bicãn], [bic&n], liorzh 'garden' [liJOrs]. There does not appear to be any rule governing whether the hiatus is filled by a voiced or a voiceless stop, but the latter seems more common.

      I suspect the intermediate stage here is a glottal stop as a hiatus filler, though I am not aware of hiatus otherwise being filled with a glottal stop in Breton dialects.

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  7. daiwer 'brother-in-law' > PGmc. *taikura- (OE tācor, OHG zeihhur).

    Polish 'dziewierz'.

    But hang on: would it not have be daiwr (Schwundstufe?) in order for it to become 'taikura' in PGmc? And also: juwnt- to become 'jugunt'? This -u- would certainly make easier the passage from g to w..

    Romance languages made a gw-, then a g- from the Germanic w-, to,guerra<--wirr-

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  8. But hang on: would it not have be daiwr (Schwundstufe?) in order for it to become 'taikura' in PGmc?

    That's the idea. The rule was originally formulated by Seebold: *w > *g (in pre-Germanic) between a sonorant and *u (there are maybe half a dozen examples). In this case, the zero grade of the consonantal stem *daiwer- (*daiwr˳- > *daiwur-) served as the base for deriving a thematic *daiwur-o-s > *daiguros > PGmc. *taikuraz. I'll return to young and its kin in a separate posting soon.

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  9. "coolth" does exist. Probably recoined jocularly many times, but it's got some traction now in discussions of server farms. It strikes me as a specific analogy of "warmth" rather than a revivification of "-th". I've only encountered it in writing, where its structure and sense are perhaps more obvious than in speech.

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  10. Thanks for pointing it out, Mollymooly! Coolth (like cooldom, which can also be seen occasionally) shows that productivity is not a question of +/- but rather of degree. Coolth seems to have been used on paper since the 16th century, by writers such as Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien and Ezra Pound, among others (of course mostly in the meaning 'low temperature').

    You are obviously right about warmth being the specific source of analogy. Warmth is special in that its formation is fully transparent. Pairs like deep/depth, not to mention merry/mirth can hardly exert analogical influence, since it would be difficult to figure out what exactly one has to do to the adjective to derive a noun. Nobody would make sense of "kilth"

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  11. As noted at Languagehat, dumbth 'stupidity' definitely exists, despite not being present in dictionaries. It does not seem to have analogical support from any specific word, and suggests that -th is still somewhat productive. Expressive words like dumb 'stupid' are often more likely to be involved in language games than more neutral words.

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  12. In Tolkien's Shire-calendar, the name of the tenth month is Winterfilth, obviously from Winterfylleþ, the name of the tenth month in the Old English calendar. Tolkien attributes this name to the filling or completion of the year before winter, reflecting an older autumnal start of the year (as in the Jewish calendar today). He also tells us that in the neighboring settlement of Bree the name was Wintring, and that it was customary to make jokes about "Winterfilth in the muddy Shire". Indeed, Bree was on a hill, as its etymology indicates, whereas the nearest part of the Shire (before the settlement of Buckland) was the Marish, a variant of marsh that took a side trip through French.

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