This 12th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

On morphemes and word formation

• Neologisms mean that those created words do not exist.

• The meaning of re- as to verb again in ‘redo’ is not kept in rebeautiful.

• The addition of a suffix as in -ful (e.g. beautiful) had the effect of making the root word increase in intensity.

• A morpheme comes in the smallest unit. Also it is the smallest unit it can be syllabified.

• For backformation, from ‘kingdom’ I can derive ‘to king a place’ and its meaning is to become the king of the occupied place.

• For ‘conceive’, the morpheme con is an allomorpheme from the meaning to cheat or do something in order to give or receive something.

• conceive means getting impregnant.

• conceive means to get something in continuous motion.

• The word -ceive is a suffix, although -ceive has no meaning in spelling.

• -ceive is a morpheme because it appears in other cases.

• For perceive, other examples include per-son, where son is a morpheme.

• Amplitude comes from ampere and maglitude.

• A hoover is a vacuum-cleaner when it functions as a noun, to indicate a non-living machine.

• Tic for tac is an example of reduplication (an eye for an eye).

• The prefix un- is used to denote not something.

• un- attaches to Adj to mean opposite, e.g. undear, unpretty. This is why uneasy is very peculiar. It is very rare to hear one say ‘the exam is uneasy’. Uneasy doesn’t mean difficult because the rule is prescriptive.

• ‘undoubtedly’ is not well-formed. Normally we would say ‘undoubtfully’.

• ‘Pineapple’ is neither a kind of apple nor is made from apple, like apple pie and apple strudels which are made from apple.

• The meaning of the compound words can be arrived at quite easily from their disintegrated parts. But yet strangely, some of the compounds do not contain what it ought to mean. Exocentric compounds illustrate the inconvenience in getting the meaning of those words.

• Some compound words are hard to predict the meaning, for example kick the bucket, which does not literary mean kick the bucket, rather the really meaning is die.

• developmental: this is two free forms together. Compare the word mental, where it’s formed from two suffixes, ment+al. Therefore, developmental can be treated as an exocentric compound, develop+mental.

• Examples of endocentric compounds are ‘ice cold’ where it means cold and ‘spicy hot’ where it means spicy.

• ‘toy dog’ means breeds of dogs that are small-size in nature so they are allowed to be kept in small flats. This is an endothermic compound.

• The compound word pot luck is tremendously opaque for non-native speakers of English.

• The parts of a white elephant are meaningless. It refers to a big useless subject. In contrast, inflectional words are easily recognised as their meanings are lucid and stark.

More to come...

	The Linguistic Doomsday—Dr. X. Nibiru
	Descrıptıvısm X!—Ldaxın Kushtaka
	SpecGram Vol CLX, No 4 Contents