Back-formation: Encyclopedia - Back-formation

Back-formation

In etymology, the process of back-formation is the creation of a neologism by reinterpreting an earlier word as a compound and removing the affixes, or more generally, by trying to reconstruct an original form from any kind of derived form (including abbreviations or inflected forms). The resulting new word is also called a back-formation.

The simplest case is when a longer form of a word pair predates what would usually be the basic form. For example, the noun resurrection was borrowed from Latin, and the verb resurrect was then derived from it. We expect the suffix -ion to be added to a verb to create a noun; when as in this case the suffix is removed from the noun to create the verb, this is a back-formation.

Back formation becomes a kind of folk etymology when it rests on an erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For example, the singular noun asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets is originally not a plural; it is a loan-word from Anglo-Norman asetz. The -s was erroneously taken to be a plural inflection.

Many words came into English by this route: Pease was once a mass noun but was reinterpreted as a plural, leading to the back-formation pea; the noun statistic was likewise a back-formation from the field of study statistics. In Britain the word burgle came into use in the 19th century as a back-formation from burglar (in America burglarize is used).

Even though many legitimate English words are formed this way, new coinages may sound strange, and are often used for humorous effect. For example, gruntled or pervious (from disgruntled and impervious) would be considered mistakes today, and used only in humorous contexts. The comedian George Gobel regularly used original back-formations in his humorous monologues. Bill Bryson mused that the English language would be richer if we could call a tidy-haired person shevelled - as an opposite to dishevelled.

Frequently back-formations begin in colloquial use and only gradually become accepted. For example, burger (and beefburger, cheeseburger, etc., from hamburger) is in common use today though it would have been considered awkward or colloquial as late as the 1940s; and enthuse (from enthusiasm) is gaining popularity, though it is still considered substandard by some today.

When a back-formation rests on morphological misconception, some regard this a mark of ignorance. Homo sapiens is Latin for thinking man and is in fact singular (plural would be homines sapientes, but note that a species name is necessarily singular) but some people incorrectly take homo sapiens to be plural, and assume homo sapien to be the singular.

Back-formation - More examples of back-formation

• babysit from babysitter
• back-form from back-formation
• bushwhack from bushwhacker
• donate from donation
• edit from editor
• greed from greedy (the noun was originally "greediness")
• interfluve from interfluvial
• intuit from intuition
• isolate from isolated
• lase from laser
• liaise from liaison
• mase from maser
• mix from mixt (adj. from Old French, misconstrued as past participle of verb)
• pea from pease
• semantic (noun) from semantics
• sightsee from sightseeing
• televise from television

See also

• backronym
• retronym
• junctural metanalysis

Category: Linguistic morphology

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Back-formation", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki