Happy #morphememonday everyone!

This week we have a special treat! This is a guest post from a linguistics expert Gina Cooke.

When I was working on a #morphememonday post I was wondering when is <i> considered to be a connector vowel and when is it considered to be part of the suffix.  I decided the best way to get a clear answer was to ask the Linguist Educator Exchange expert. I sent her this question:

I was wondering if you could clarify whether <ial> is a suffix in its own right or is it a connecting vowel followed by a suffix <i> + <al>?

…and here is her reply:

This may be a quick question, and I could give it a quick answer, but the answer is not the point. The understanding is. The same question could be asked of <ity> vs. <i + ty>, or <ual> vs. <u + al>, or <iate> vs. <i + ate>, or <uous> vs. <u + ous>. I could go on. If you have the understanding, you don’t have to ask someone else every time you encounter a similar pattern, because the bigger picture stays the same.

 

The question of whether something is a suffix “in its own right” (unanalyzable) or is itself complex (analyzable) is an excellent question. It is a question of elegance within the system. The question of elegance in science is sometimes called the Principle of Parsimony (Lex Parsimoniaein Latin), or Occam’s Razor. Another word for parsimony is ‘stinginess’ — we want to be stingy with our explanations. The way Occam put it, we should not multiply entities unnecessarily. This principle exhorts the scientist to seek the simplest or sparest explanation that accounts for the widest number of examples. If you have a different explanation for every data point in a system, that’s not elegant, and it’s not science. It’s multiplying entities [explanations, categories, members of a set…] unnecessarily.

 

This kind of elegance reasoning is critical for any scientist, and it happens all the time. There are infinite examples of how this applies in the sciences: One is paleontologist Jack Horner’s discovery and correction of the longstanding academic tendency to misidentify baby dinosaurs as different species from the adults. Another is if-then pathways in computer programming, or flowcharts. Another is the horrifyingly long-overdue and 100% empirical understanding that there is only one human “race.”

 

So, how does Occam’s Razor apply to questions about the written word? Well, when we study orthography scientifically, we want to seek the simplest explanation or pattern for the widest number of examples, the widest number of data points, in the system. For example, we would not teach ‘hard <c>’ and ‘soft <c>’ as two different graphemes each doing their own thing; rather, it is a single grapheme that can account for more than one phoneme.

 

Another example is what is commonly called the “floss rule,” where literacy teachers teach a single pattern with the letters <s, z, f, l> in words like miss, buzz, off, pill. But we don’t teach all of those as individual patterns; we teach one pattern that accounts for multiple examples. What is even more elegant is when people can explain flsz as a part of a broader pattern that includes, e.g. <ck, tch, dg(e)>. Likewise, this can be connected to even broader patterns in the orthography, like function word vs. content word spellings.

 

Here’s another, very common example: It is far more elegant to understand that there is a single <-ion> suffix that may follow a <t> or an <s> than it is to posit both a *<-tion> and an *<-sion>, as in words like action, tension, nation, permission. We already have an <-ion> in words without a preceding <t> or <s>, as in union, legion, religion, suspicion. The <-ion> is therefore a single entity, a data point in our system. The stems that it can fix to that do end in <t(e)> or <s(e) can be found elsewhere: act~actor, tense~tensile, native~innate, permissive — so we already have <ion>, <act>, <tense>, <nate>, and <miss>. If you add *<-tion> and *<-sion>, then you have to also add *<ac->, *<ten->, *<na-> and *<mis-> to your inventory, as well as *<-tor>, *<-sile>, *<tive>, and *<-sive> to your ever-more-bloated inventory.

 

That’s not elegant, and it’s not scientific.   

 

So, to your specific question about <-ial> versus <i + al>. For starters, if you have a word like partial which quite obviously has the free base <part>, both of the following analyses are presumably coherent, even if one is incomplete:

 

<part + ial>

<part + i + al>

 

However, *<par + tial> is not coherent, as it violates the integrity of the English base element. A good analogy would be if I said that paintings could be analyzed as <paint + ings> or <paint + ing + s>, but not as *<pain + tings> nor even *<pain + ting + s>.

 

We already have plenty of evidence for a connecting <i> in Latinate words — in both compounds like artifact, sacrifice, equinox, and many more; or preceding a suffix, as in malicious, abbreviate, curiosity, and many more. And we already have plenty of evidence for an <-al> suffix without a preceding <i>, as in normal, global, herbalactual, and hundreds more words. So we had better have a damn good reason for adding an <-ial> to our inventory of affixes in addition to the <-i-> and the <-al>. In other words, if you want to multiple your entities, it has to be necessary. And the only reason it would be necessary would be if the words with <ial> had a totally different etymology than the words with just <-i-> or just <-al>. And that is simply not the case, if you look at the histories of these patterns. So let’s look.

 

Here’s what my Mactionary says: image.png

image.png

 

 

Those look the same, right? It’s not like the <-ial> derives from something like French <-iole> or <-ité>. So, while that doesn’t confirm that they *are* the same, we sure don’t have any evidence yet that they are different. But regular dictionaries don’t always lay out the bloodline of words for you, especially with suffixes. The Online Etymology Dictionary often does, because laying out the bloodline is its lifeblood.

image.png

Here, the reader gets not just an answer, but an understanding. Connecting vowel letters used to be part of the preceding part of the word — the stem — not part of the suffix that follows. They can be analyzed from the preceding part of the stem. Hence, they connect the base or stem to the rest of the word. Students of Latin are familiar with the characteristic vowels in Latin paradigms.

 

But not every word ending with <i + al> will have a connecting <i>:

 

<family + al>

<tri + vi + al>

<colony + al>

<memory + al>

 

The point is not to recite rules or memorize inventories; it is to understand how to approach the question. But here is the most important thing: it would do you no good whatsoever to be able to say, Well, <-al> is the suffix because Gina Cooke said so. No one cares what I think because of my fetching personality, nor should they, and that should end the debate for no one. But if you can say, here’s my understanding, and here’s the evidence for it, then people have to make a decision. They can either cling to the understanding they already have, with no evidence beyond “that’s what Louisa Moats says” or “that’s what the dictionary says;” or they can recognize that you’ve given them an understanding and the evidence to support it, and maybe shown them how to find it for themselves.

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