Ministry of higher and secondary
ADJECTIVE- FORMING SUFFIXES "able to be"
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- NOUN-FORMING SUFFIXES
- "act of, result of"
- VERB-FORMING SUFFIXES
Suffix Meaning Example(s)
ADJECTIVE- FORMING SUFFIXES"able to be"-able able to be, able to, tending to capable -ible able to be, able to, tending to flexible -ile able to be, able to, tending to docile "tending to"
"possessing" (past participle)
NOUN-FORMING SUFFIXES"quality of, state of" (abstract qualities) Suffix Meaning Example(s)-acity quality of being inclined to rapacity -acy quality of being, quality of having legacy
-ity, -ety, -ty quality of, state of sobriety -(u)lence, -(o)lence state or quality of violence
that which must be"
"office of" -ate office of, holders of the office of potentate "act of, result of"(concrete nouns) -ion act of, state of, result of action -men result of, means of, act of, state of regimen -ment result of, means of, act of, state of regiment
VERB-FORMING SUFFIXES"to"-at(e) to officiate -ite to expedite "to begin" (inchoative) -esce to begin, become convalesce "to make"-ify, -efy to make mollify Attempts to purify the languageThe rise of humanism in the 15th century meant the reassessment of the nature and function of Latin. Humanists were intent on re-establishing the Latin of the classics. They disapproved of the spoken variety of Latin and wanted it to be taught and pronounced in its classical state. This made Latin a dead language. To become expert in classical Latin required much more study then to be able to use some form of Vulgar Latin. Command of Latin became restricted gradually to scholars. Scholars like Erasmus could write and speak in classical Latin, for Latin remained the language of international scholarship, and authors like John Milton and Francis Bacon could write Latin as well as English, and issued some of their works in Latin. Fewer people used Latin, so it ceased to be a possible competitor with English at the spoken level, and even at the written level its use became restricted to scholarship and to certain formulaic documents and memorials [3, 231]. Although English could now develop as both the national spoken and written language of England, the existence of Latin as a dead language and of French as a fash- ionable language cultivated outside England had important implications. A living lan- guage like English could never be as perfect as a dead language like Latin, which was also the language which provided the model for all grammatical systems. Latin was considered to be a perfect language because its grammar had been codified. In the same way, a language that had only recently formed standardized varieties and in which approved works of merit, such as those written by the literary triumvirate, i.e. Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate had only just started to be composed, could hardly be compared with a language like French, which not only had its origins in Latin, but which could also trace its literary history back several centuries. As a consequence, the English felt that their language was inferior to Latin and French. The changes that English as a living language was subject to had already started to receive unfavourable mention in the fourteenth century and this criticism increased enormously. This problem grew bigger with the invention of printing. For the early printers needed to provide texts in an English that was acceptable to everyone in the country and also up to date. The problems which critics complained of in English centred on its barbarous nature because it lacked the refinement of Latin and French. It was not expressive enough because it did not have the necessary vocabulary, and the vocabulary it did have was unsophisticated. One could not express oneself elegantly in English, because it lacked the refinement of French and Latin. It was not polished [18, 201]. This was the time when people started to think about how to purify the language. Purist tendencies emerge when “there is a recurrent phenomenon that speakers of a language agree that the state of their language is in decline, that it contains too many words from informal varieties, that it is threatened by modernising and foreign influences: in short, that it was better in the olden days and that nowadays something needs to be done to restore it to its former glory” [35, 40]: a) archaisms: crossed instead of crucified, wiseards instead of magi, waite on in- stead of servant, biwordes instead of parables, hunderer instead of centurion, etc. b) caiques from Latin and Greek: freshman from proselyte, gainsbirth from re- generation, gainrising from resurrection, etc. Ralph Lever, the most radical of the English purists of the time, tried to substi- tute the Latin terminology of Logic in English with his own coinages, using compound- ing as the main means of his word formation: an endsay instead of Latin (later on L) conclusion, an inbeer instead of L accidens, a naysay instead of L negation, saywhat instead of L definition, speechcrafte instead of L rhetoric, etc. None of Cheke’s or Lever’s coinages has ever reached the active vocabulary of Standard English [36, 27]. Cheke was against “borrowing of other tongues”, yet he knew that English was “unperfight” and it was necessary to borrow words from other languages [40, 34]. In the sixteenth century, English did not have a good reputation. It was consid- ered to be a mixture of several languages. Peter Heylyn writes in his description of the earth that it is “a decompound of Dutch, French and Latine” [41, 11]. According to Bullokar, “it is not sufficiently furnished with apt terms to express all meanings” while Urquhart states that “paucity of words is the worst disease of our language” [46, 19]. The purists continued their activity in the nineteenth century as well. They wanted to defend English from foreign influences. They wanted to anglosaxonise England. “Nineteenth-century Britain saw great changes in political, economical and social life. But the most decisive influence of the language came from the rapid development of science and different branches of industry with their new notions, objects and inventions to be denoted. The experience of the past was taken into account as new terms were derived with the help of Greek and Latin morphemes [19, 300]. A new flood of loans from the classical languages resulted in the emergence of two forms of linguistic purism: xenophobic, represented by William Barnes and the poets G. M. Hopkins and W. Morris, supported by R. Ch. Trench, and elitist, represented by G. Graham, A. Bain, A. Ellis and other language critics. William Barnes, the most conservative and thorough English purist of the nineteenth century, saw the reform of Victorian English in its Anglo-Saxon past and tried to anglosaxonise the complex borrowed words or their components [46, 46]. He was very well acquainted with the works of his German colleagues and he followed their example, inventing PSs for the everyday and scientific vocabulary of Romance origin. The poets G.M. Hopkins and W. Morris directed their efforts at reforming English poetic language only. Barnes, Hopkins and Morris made great use of the following means and sources of PS formation: revival of Old English (OE) words: gleecraft instead of music, inwit instead of conscience, wort instead of plant (Barnes); chapman instead of merchant, lustyhead instead of pleasure, abye instead of to suffer (Morris), etc. or OE affixes: to for-free-en instead of to absolve, folkdom instead of democracy, breaksome instead of fragile (Barnes); astray, abide, unhouse, unbake (Hopkins); to-wearied ‘extremely wearied’, beewooed ‘allured, attracted’, ungreedy ‘generous’ (Morris), etc. use of dialectal words and elements; doughty instead of active, fall instead of autumn (cf. AmE fall), sprack instead of energetic, toilsome instead of industrious (Barnes); cringe, dings, dint, flanks, gash, hack, hempen, housel (Hopkins), etc. [23, 412]. As a conclusion we can say that the English language reform was unsuccessful because it was realised that loanwords could not be eliminated from the language, they were really needed. Old words cannot be revived because loanwords have come into general use in the English language. Yüklə 499,73 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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