nathanielthecurious:allthingslinguistic:A classic table of accidental lexical gaps in English, from

nathanielthecurious:allthingslinguistic:A classic table of accidental lexical gaps in English, from Language Log.Super cool table. The -or is a really, really common derivational suffix used to talk about “the state of being x” or “xing” or “xness” in Latin, and that’s what all of these words are directly borrowed from. So because I have no life, here’s a quick list I formed by going through Wikipedia’s list of third-declension Latin nouns and choosing the ones that I think are relevant to this morphological structure.Some ones we have in English aside from the ones you mentioned:rumorsplendorsqualortremortumorvaporvalorhumor (had a somewhat different meaning)ardorcalorerrorfurorfulgorfavorhonorlaborodortenortimid from timorPlus I made a list of ones that I don’t think we even have equivalent loan-words for in English, but since there’s a lot of them and probably nobody cares and I’m not enough of an Indo-Europeanist to speak knowledgeably about all this etymology, I’ll leave them off of this post.(N.B. Forgot to say this before, but the -idus and -bilis forms also apply in Latin for most of these.)I don’t know where I’m going with this. So yeah, there’s a lot of lexical gaps.Bene.That chart is a bit simplistic for another reason: differences in how the -or words relate to the -fy words. The relationship between horror and horrify is not the same as the relationship between liquor and liquefy. While horror comes from the Latin verb horrere and liquor comes from the Latin verb liquere, horrify comes from the Latin adjective horrificus (itself a compound of horror and facere) and the denominative verb horrificare, and liquefy comes from liquefacere, a combination of liquere and facere.Another thing to consider is that the root-suffix pattern is not as neat as the chart might suggest. While it is the case that many of the -or nouns and the corresponding Latin -ibilis and English -ible adjectives derive from second-conjugation Latin verbs that lack supine stems, not all of them do. Horror and horribilis/horrible come from horrere (-o, -ui, -). Error comes from errare (-o, -avi, -atum), and the -bilis suffix regularly attaches to the stem vowel a of first-conjugation verbs, so we would expect errabilis/errable, not erribilis/errible. Other -or words do not seem to have analogously corresponding verbs in existence: odor, rumor, honor. We can easily make up the verbs odificare/odify and honificare/honify, and there already exists a Latin rumificare (corresponding to an English rumify). If we want to think of the -ibilis/-ible adjectives that come from supine-less second-conjugation Latin verbs as more precisely constructed from the combination of the suffix -ibilis and a root (e.g. horribilis from root HORR + -ibilis), then we can make corresponding -ibilis/-ible adjectives for odor, rumor, honor: odibilis/odible (root OD), rumibilis/rumible (root RUM), honibilis/honible (root HON). -- source link
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