I'm a bit busy getting my core chapter ready to hand in, so just a quick post on an English word I spotted lately: agflation. The term confirms the ever-increasing productivity of "-flation" as a suffix; the phenomenon is rather alarming.
3 comments:
Anonymous
said...
That's a funny link. Hey, I discovered a new suffix, too: ctive.
"Ctive" by itself is not in the dictionary. However, when adding prefixes to "ctive", many words have been created. They are:
I've never heard or seen agflation and I wouldn't have known what it meant before looking it up. The putative ag- prefix is supposed to be derived from Latin 'to', right? But surely it's only ag- before a g-initial word (velar stop, not alveolar affricate), like agglutinate. To retrospectively coin to-flation would surely give afflation, would it not?
Oh, I see. I just read the economist article, apparently the ag- alludes to the agricultural sector. I don't know if I buy that one. I'd have preferred agriflation, it doesn't quite as neatly reflect inflation though.
3 comments:
That's a funny link. Hey, I discovered a new suffix, too: ctive.
"Ctive" by itself is not in the dictionary. However, when adding prefixes to "ctive", many words have been created. They are:
active, fictive, retroactive, factive, elective, invective, selective, productive.
I've never heard or seen agflation and I wouldn't have known what it meant before looking it up. The putative ag- prefix is supposed to be derived from Latin 'to', right? But surely it's only ag- before a g-initial word (velar stop, not alveolar affricate), like agglutinate. To retrospectively coin to-flation would surely give afflation, would it not?
Oh, I see. I just read the economist article, apparently the ag- alludes to the agricultural sector. I don't know if I buy that one. I'd have preferred agriflation, it doesn't quite as neatly reflect inflation though.
AGH!
;-)
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