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An affix is small word element that cannot occur independently, but only attached to a root or stem. Affixes are classified (1) by their position (prefix, suffix/ending, or in some languages infix) or (2) in some languages by the category of function they perform (e.g., agglutinative affix or grammatical affix).
An antecedent is the word or phrase to which a pronoun refers, e.g., “George is the man who came yesterday.” George is the antecedent of “who.” Outside of linguistics, it can mean simply that something came earlier: “the antecedent political situation.”
Cognate means having a common ancestor. For example, Spanish tomato and French tomate are cognate words, both borrowed from Nahuatl tomatl, the Spanish directly, the French indirectly (via Spanish). More broadly, Spanish and French are cognate languages, both descended (principally) from Latin. Cognate languages are sometimes called “sister” languages. Cognatation is a matter of historical fact. But cognate words evolve with the remainder of their languages and hence do not necessarily have the same meanings. For example, English “barbarian” (an uncivilized person), is cognate with ancient Greek barbaros, which referred to anyone who didn’t speak Greek. So is Sanskrit yavana, but the Sanskrit word referred to anyone who didn’t speak Sanskrit.
A correlative —the term is used only in Esperanto linguistics— is any word in a series of function words that can be arranged in a more or less regular table like the following one. (American linguists sometimes speak collectively of English “WH words.”) Although this English table is not as well developed as the correlative table of Esperanto, it is clear that there are regularities, even if some cells are blank. Similar tables could be constructed for other languages.
| Person | Thing | Time | Place | Manner | Means |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who | What/Which | When | Where | Why/Wherefore | How/Wherewith |
| (That person) | That | Then | There | (Because) | (Thus) |
| Nobody | Nothing | Never | Nowhere | “Nohow” | (By no means) |
| Somebody | Something | Sometimes | Somewhere | Somehow | (In some way) |
| Anybody | Anything | Any time | Anywhere | (Any way) | Anyhow |
| Everybody | Everything | (Always) | Everywhere | (Every way) | (By every means) |
For correlatives in Esperanto, click here.
See affix.
False friends are foreign words that a language learner finds familiar but misunderstands, usually because of structural similarity to words in a language already studied but a semantic difference. In some cases, these are false cognates: words that seem to be cognate but are not. However they can also be words whose meaning has changed substantially in one or both languages to the point that their shared historical roots are misleading. An example would be English “attend,” which (almost) never carries the old Latin meaning of “await” that it routinely carries in Romance languages.
Geminate refers to doubling of a consonant, such as the double N in “thinness,” when it affects pronunciation. A consonant like N can be held for a longer or shorter time, so a geminate N is easily spoken. Stop sounds obviously cannot be held in this way, and the word geminate in that case refers to the extremely brief pause before the stop consonant is released. In transcription this is sometimes shown by a doubling of the written consonant to show that it is “long.” Thus in romanized Japanese ite means to remain, but itte, pronounced with a pause before the T is released, means to depart. For most readers of this page, the contrast is probably most salient for Italian. (See Pronouncing Italian for more.)
Germanic languages are those descended from Proto-Germanic,a language of Scandinavia in the Iron Age. They include English and German, but also others rarely taught in American universities, such as Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Swedish, and Dutch, as well as extinct languages such as Gothic and Vandalic.
Two or more words are said to be homonyms if they have the same pronunciation (and often the same spelling) but different meanings; for example: The bank of a river as opposed to the bank where money is kept. Two or more words are said to be synonyms if they have roughly the same meaning; for example: Sleeplessness and insomnia. Two words are considered to be antonyms if their meanings are opposites; for example: wet and dry, high and low, good and bad.
Inflection refers to three things: (1) The process or effect of showing grammatical relationships by making changes in the form of words, usually by using grammatical affixes. Examples are conjugation and declension. See affix. (2) Any such distinctive modification itself. (3) The cadence and pitch pattern of an utterance.
Parts of speech are generic categories of words, based on their functions. Examples are nouns, verbs and prepositions.
Pragmatics refers to the way that language relates to the contexts in which it is used, to request, report, repremand, ridicule, and so on. Language use in context necessarily has rather vague boundaries as a study, and has, depending on the focus, been called the ethnography of speaking, sociolinguistics, language and culture, the politics of language, the sociology of language, and various other things.
See affix.
Romance languages are those descended from Latin. They include Spanish, French, and Italian, as well as others rarely taught in American universities, such as Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalán.
A root or stem is the main part of a word which carries the core meaning and to which affixes (prefixes and suffixes) may be added. For some languages it is useful to differentiate between a root, as the base form, and a stem, which also includes any non-grammatical affixes (i.e., “agglutinative” or “derivational” affixes) and to which grammatical affixes are yet to be attached. For example, “rewrites” consists of an agglutinative prefix (“re-“) plus a root (“write”), making a stem (“rewrite-“), plus a grammatical suffix (“‑s”) to form the whole word.
See root & stem..
See affix.