On 2008-12-05 19:54, Arnaud Fournet wrote:
> Good joke, M. Gasiorowski.
It was intended as a joke.
> As far as I can see, all words are inherited or made with inherited
> morphemes.
Nearly all. But don't confuse morphological changes (such as adding
affixes to a word) with phonetic ones. A new derivative is a _new word_,
even if the morphemes are old. If you compare any French word to its
Latin prototype or any English word to its early Germanic ancestor, in
the vast majority of cases they will prove to have become _much_
abbreviated. PGmc. *xauBuðan and *kuninGaz (3 syllables each) became OE
he:afod and cyning (disyllabic) and these have been further shortened to
Mod.E head and king. Most of the surviving compounds formed in OE have
become similarly contracted (hla:f-weard > lord) or at least obscured,
losing some segments in the process (go:s-hafoc > goshawk).
Piotr