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WIKIBOOKS
DISPONIBILI
?????????

ART
- Great Painters
BUSINESS&LAW
- Accounting
- Fundamentals of Law
- Marketing
- Shorthand
CARS
- Concept Cars
GAMES&SPORT
- Videogames
- The World of Sports

COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
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- PHP Language and Applications
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EDUCATION
- Education
LITERATURE
- Masterpieces of English Literature
LINGUISTICS
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- English Dictionaries
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MEDICINE
- Medical Emergencies
- The Theory of Memory
MUSIC&DANCE
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- Musical Notation
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SCIENCE
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- Nanotechnology
LIFESTYLE
- Cosmetics
- Diets
- Vegetarianism and Veganism
TRADITIONS
- Christmas Traditions
NATURE
- Animals

- Fruits And Vegetables



ARTICLES IN THE BOOK

  1. Adverbial
  2. Agentive ending
  3. Ain't
  4. American and British English differences
  5. American and British English pronunciation differences
  6. American and British English spelling differences
  7. American English
  8. Amn't
  9. Anglophone
  10. Anglosphere
  11. Apostrophe
  12. Australian English
  13. Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet
  14. Bracket
  15. British and American keyboards
  16. British English
  17. Canadian English
  18. Certificate of Proficiency in English
  19. Classical compound
  20. Cockney
  21. Colon
  22. Comma
  23. Comma splice
  24. Cut Spelling
  25. Dangling modifier
  26. Dash
  27. Definite article reduction
  28. Disputed English grammar
  29. Don't-leveling
  30. Double copula
  31. Double negative
  32. Ellipsis
  33. English alphabet
  34. English compound
  35. English declension
  36. English English
  37. English grammar
  38. English honorifics
  39. English irregular verbs
  40. English language learning and teaching
  41. English modal auxiliary verb
  42. English orthography
  43. English passive voice
  44. English personal pronouns
  45. English phonology
  46. English plural
  47. English relative clauses
  48. English spelling reform
  49. English verbs
  50. English words with uncommon properties
  51. Estuary English
  52. Exclamation mark
  53. Foreign language influences in English
  54. Full stop
  55. Generic you
  56. Germanic strong verb
  57. Gerund
  58. Going-to future
  59. Grammatical tense
  60. Great Vowel Shift
  61. Guillemets
  62. Habitual be
  63. History of linguistic prescription in English
  64. History of the English language
  65. Hyphen
  66. I before e except after c
  67. IELTS
  68. Initial-stress-derived noun
  69. International Phonetic Alphabet for English
  70. Interpunct
  71. IPA chart for English
  72. It's me
  73. Languages of the United Kingdom
  74. Like
  75. List of animal adjectives
  76. List of British idioms
  77. List of British words not widely used in the United States
  78. List of case-sensitive English words
  79. List of commonly confused homonyms
  80. List of common misspellings in English
  81. List of common words that have two opposite senses
  82. List of dialects of the English language
  83. List of English apocopations
  84. List of English auxiliary verbs
  85. List of English homographs
  86. List of English irregular verbs
  87. List of English prepositions
  88. List of English suffixes
  89. List of English words invented by Shakespeare
  90. List of English words of Celtic origin
  91. List of English words of Italian origin
  92. List of English words with disputed usage
  93. List of frequently misused English words
  94. List of Fumblerules
  95. List of homophones
  96. List of -meters
  97. List of names in English with non-intuitive pronunciations
  98. List of words having different meanings in British and American English
  99. List of words of disputed pronunciation
  100. London slang
  101. Longest word in English
  102. Middle English
  103. Modern English
  104. Names of numbers in English
  105. New Zealand English
  106. Northern subject rule
  107. Not!
  108. NuEnglish
  109. Oxford spelling
  110. Personal pronoun
  111. Phonological history of the English language
  112. Phrasal verb
  113. Plural of virus
  114. Possessive adjective
  115. Possessive antecedent
  116. Possessive me
  117. Possessive of Jesus
  118. Possessive pronoun
  119. Preposition stranding
  120. Pronunciation of English th
  121. Proper adjective
  122. Question mark
  123. Quotation mark
  124. Received Pronunciation
  125. Regional accents of English speakers
  126. Rhyming slang
  127. Run-on sentence
  128. Scouse
  129. Semicolon
  130. Semordnilap
  131. Serial comma
  132. Shall and will
  133. Silent E
  134. Singular they
  135. Slash
  136. SoundSpel
  137. Space
  138. Spelling reform
  139. Split infinitive
  140. Subjective me
  141. Suffix morpheme
  142. Tag question
  143. Than
  144. The Reverend
  145. Third person agreement leveling
  146. Thou
  147. TOEFL
  148. TOEIC
  149. Truespel
  150. University of Cambridge ESOL examination
  151. Weak form and strong form
  152. Welsh English
  153. Who
  154. You

 

 
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THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
This article is from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_compound

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License 

Classical compound

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

A large portion of the technical and scientific lexicon of English and other Western European languages consists of classical compounds. These are compound words composed from Latin or Ancient Greek root words.

There would be no dinosaurs in English without classical compounds.
There would be no dinosaurs in English without classical compounds.

A source of international technical vocabulary

These classical compounds represent a significant source of Neo-Latin vocabulary. Moreover, since these words are composed from classical languages whose prestige is or was respected throughout the West European culture, these words typically appear in many different languages. Their widespread use makes technical writing generally accessible to readers who may only have a smattering of the language in which it appears.

Not all Western European languages have been equally receptive to classical technical compounds. German, for instance, has historically attempted to create its own technical vocabulary from native elements. Usually, these creations are German calques on the international vocabulary, such as Wasserstoff for hydrogen. Like any exercise in language prescription, this endeavour has been only partially successful, so while official German may still speak of a Fernsprecher, public telephones will be labelled with the internationally recognized Telefon.

Formation, spelling, and pronunciation

These words are compounds formed from Latin and Ancient Greek root words. Ancient Greek words are almost invariably romanized (see transliteration of Ancient Greek into English). In English:

  • Ancient Greek αι becomes e, or sometimes æ or ae in British English.
  • Ancient Greek groups with γ plus a stop consonant such as γγ or γκ become ng and nc respectively.
  • Ancient Greek ει often becomes i (occasionally it is retained as ei).
  • Ancient Greek κ becomes c, and in English pronunciation is subject to palatization.
  • Ancient Greek (rho with spiritus asper) becomes rh.
  • Ancient Greek θ becomes th.
  • Ancient Greek φ becomes ph.
  • Ancient Greek ψ becomes ps.
  • Ancient Greek χ becomes ch.
  • Ancient Greek υ becomes y.
  • Ancient Greek ου becomes u.
  • Ancient Greek ω becomes o.
  • Ancient Greek rough breathing becomes h-.

Thus, for example, Ancient Greek σφιγξ becomes English (and Latin) sphinx. Exceptions to these romanizing rules occur, such as leukemia (leukaemia); compare leukocyte, also leucocyte. In Latin, and in the target languages, the Greek vowels are given their classical values rather than their contemporary values in demotic Greek.

Ancient Greek words often contain consonant clusters which are foreign to the phonology of contemporary English and other languages that incorporate these words into their lexicon: diphthong; pneumatology, phthisis. The typical response in English is to treat the unfamiliar cluster as containing one or more silent letters and suppress their pronunciation. This adds to the irregularities of English spelling; moreover, since many of these words are encountered in writing more often than they are heard spoken, it introduces uncertainty as to how to pronounce them when encountered.

Classical compounds frequently vary their stressed syllable when suffixes are added: ágriculture, agricúltural. This also gives rise to uncertainty when these words are encountered in print. Once a classical compound has been created and borrowed, it typically becomes the foundation of a whole series of related words: e.g. astrology, astrological, astrologer/astrologist, astrologism.

History and reception

English began incorporating many of these words in the sixteenth century; geography first appeared in an English text in 1535, other early adopted words that still survive include mystagogue, from the 1540s, and androgyne, from the 1550s. The use of these technical terms predates the scientific method; the several varieties of divination all take their names from classical compounds, such as alectryomancy, divination by the pecking of chickens.

Not all English writers have been friendly to the reception of classical vocabulary. The Tudor period writer Sir John Cheke wrote:

I am of this opinion that our own tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges; wherein if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.

and therefore rejected what he called "inkhorn terms".

Similar sentiments moved the nineteenth century author William Barnes to create "pure English," in which he sought to strip out all Ancient Greek and Latinisms and find Anglo-Saxon equivalents therefor: for Barnes, the newly invented art of the photograph became a sun-print. Unlike this one, some of Barnes's coinages caught on, such as foreword, Barnes's replacement for the preface of a book. Later, Poul Anderson wrote a jocular piece called Uncleftish Beholding in a constructed language based on English which others have called Ander-Saxon; this attempted to create a pure English vocabulary for nuclear physics.

More recent developments

Many such words, such as thermometer, dinosaur, rhinoceros, and rhododendron, are thoroughly incorporated into the English lexicon and are the ordinary words for their referents. Some are prone to colloquial shortening; rhinoceros often becomes rhino, a situation which may give rise to ambiguity when someone moves from speaking of rhinoceroses to rhinoviruses. The binomial nomenclature of taxonomy and biology is a major source for these items of vocabulary; for many unfamiliar species that lack a common English name, the name of the genus becomes the English word for that life form.

In the metric system, prefixes that indicate multipliers are typically Greek in origin, such as kilogram, while those that indicate divisors are Latin, as in millimeter: the base roots resemble Greek words, but in truth are neologisms. These metric and other suffixes are added to native English roots as well, resulting in creations such as gigabyte. Words of mixed Latin and Greek lineage, or words that combine elements of the classical languages with English, were formerly castigated as "barbarisms" by prescriptionist usage commentators; this disapproval has mostly abated. Indeed, in scientific nomenclature, even more exotic hybrids have appeared, such as for example the dinosaur Yangchuanosaurus. Personal names appear in some scientific names such as Fuchsia.

Classical compounds are sometimes used to lend grandeur or the impression of scientific rigour to humble pursuits: the study of cosmetology will not help anyone become an astronaut. Compounds along these models are also sometimes coined for humorous effect, such as odontopodology, the science of putting your foot into your mouth. These humorous coinages sometimes take on a life of their own, such as garbology, the study of garbage.

Some classical compounds form classical plurals, and are therefore irregular in English. Others do not, while some vacillate between classical and regular plurals.

See also

  • -ology
  • -ism
  • List of Latin and Ancient Greek words commonly used in systematic names for help with Greek-derived scientific names of organisms
  • List of Ancient Greek words with English derivatives
  • List of Latin words with English derivatives

Reference

  • McArthur, Tom (ed.): The Oxford Companion to the English Language, (Oxford University Press, 1992}. ISBN 0-19-214183-X
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_compound"