Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/86

64 was nothing about them save this extensibility of their application and frequency of their use to distinguish their compounds from such as house-top, break-neck, forehead, fortnight, and the others of the same class to which we have already referred. Yet this was quite enough to bring about a change of their recognized character, from that of distinct words to that of non-significant appendages to other words. Each passed over into the condition of a formative element; that is to say, an element showing the logical form, the grammatical character, of a derivative, as distinguished from its primitive, the word to which the sign was appended. There was a time when fear-full, fear-loose, fear-free, free-making, fear-struck, love-like, love-rich, love-sick, love-lorn, were all words of the same kind, mere lax combinations; it was only their different degree of availability for answering the ends of speech, for supplying the perceived needs of expression, that caused two or three of them to assume a different character, while the rest remained as they had been.

Often, as every one knows, there is an accumulation of formative elements in the same word. In truthfully, for example, we have the adverbial suffix ly added to the primitive truthful; in which, again, the adjective suffix ful has performed the same office toward the remoter primitive truth. By the use of a formative element of another kind, a prefix, we might have made the yet more intricate compound untruthfully. Nay, further, truth itself contains a suffix, and is a derivative from the adjective true, as appears from its analogy with wealth from well, width from wide, strength from strong, and many other like words; and even true, did we trace its history to the beginning, we should find ending in a formative element, and deriving its origin from a verbal root meaning 'to be firm, strong, reliable.' The Latin part of our language, which includes most of our many-syllabled words, offers abundant instances of a similar complicated structure. Thus, the term inapplicabilities contains two prefixes, the negative in and the preposition ad which means 'to,' and three suffixes, able, forming adjectives, ty, forming abstract nouns from adjectives, and s, the plural ending, all clustered about the verbal root plic, which we have already