Suffix-o-rama

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Thursday 11 October 2007 @17:09

Grammar maven Patricia T. O’Conner responded via email to my query about suffix orthogonality. I don’t think she will mind my reprinting it here.

Hi, Chris,

You’ve done a lot more thinking about this suffix business than I have. Most of the shades of difference with adjectives ending in “-ic” and “-ical” seem to have developed idiomatically and there are no general rules governing them.

Suffixes in general can be quite mysterious. For example, two opposite suffixes (”-less” and “-ful”) give similar meanings the case of “shameless” and “shameful.” But I may be able to come up with some rough guidelines for certain kinds of suffixes.

In the case of agent nouns formed by adding “-er” and “-or,” there’s a generality to be made. Often the “-er” ones come from Old English (like “singer,” with roots in ancient Germanic), while the “-or” ones are derived from Latin (like “editor,” from the Latin edere*, “edit”). Even here, though, there are exceptions. When an English word has both endings (like “adviser”/”advisor”), the “-er” ending is often the older one. In the case of some legal terms, it appears that lawyers historically have been fonder of more pompous-looking Latinate endings than of simple Germanic ones. (Historically, English academics, jurists, and churchmen always respected Latin more than Old English, which explains much of the confusion about English grammar.)

Then there’s the “-ible”-vs.”-able” ending. If there’s a generality to be made, it’s this: Often a word derived from Old English or another Germanic source (like Old Dutch, Old Icelandic, Old Norse and so on) will end in “able” (“forgivable,” “lovable,” “readable”). But a word derived directly from Latin will end in “ible” (“terrible,” “audible,” “legible”). Again, this is only a rough generality, since there are exceptions. And oddities too: “eatable” is from the Old English etan (”eat”) while “edible” is from the Latin edere* (”eat”).

I can understand how a mathematician might be frustrated by all these generalities. As the grammarian Otto Jespersen once said, this isn’t Euclidean geometry.

Pat O’Conner
*The Latin edere can mean to eat, to publish, to edit, to give forth.

Thanks!

Suffixation

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Saturday 22 September 2007 @10:31

Dear Grammar Mavens,

In English, the suffixes ‘-ic’ and ‘-ical’ both form adjectives from nouns. An object exhibiting symmetry is ‘symmetric’, and the aims of a devil are ‘diabolical’.

My question is about how we use each suffix. For some roots, they seem interchangeable (diabolic vs. diabolical). For others they produce distinct shades of meaning (mythic vs. mythical). In some cases, one conceivable variant is absent from the dictionary and never used (chaotic vs. *chaotical, or *chemic vs. chemical). And in other cases, one variant seems to be preferred but the other can be found in the dictionary and is often heard (cyclic vs. cyclical).

To me personally, words like ‘cyclical’, ‘symmetrical’, and ‘fantastical’ clearly have redundant suffixes, because ‘cyclic’, ‘symmetric’, and ‘fantastic’ are already perfectly good adjectives. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to apply my own rule consistently, because I would use ‘parenthetical’ over ‘parenthetic’.

Nouns ending in ‘-ic’ confuse things too: ‘magic’ is both a noun and an adjective, but we also have ‘magical’ to make slight semantic distinctions. A “magic journey” is supernatural (perhaps enabled by a magic carpet or enchanted broomstick), whereas a “magical journey” is merely extraordinary.

‘Logic’ is strictly a noun (we need -al to form the adjective), but mysteriously, both ‘gynecologic’ and ‘gynecological’ are listed in my dictionary as adjectives. Similarly, ‘graphic’ and ‘graphical’ are both adjectives, as is ‘cryptographic’, but not *‘cryptographical’. In the former case, there might again be different shades of meaning: is a graphic depiction the same as a graphical depiction?

Is there any pattern or method to this madness? As a borderline mathematician, I would prefer orthogonal grammatical characteristics (orthogonalistical grammatic characterisms); as a language user, perhaps I must submit to its haphazardly evolved nature.

Paper compression

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Tuesday 14 November 2006 @0:38

Our paper is just about ready for Wednesday’s conference deadline. This might be the earliest I’ve ever ‘finished’ a paper — is it ever really finished? — nearly 36 hours before the deadline.

Of course, 5 hours ago it was a page and a half too long, so I started applying my time-tested ‘paper compression’ techniques:

• reduce the vertical space taken up by figures containing code and examples, even if that means abandoning customary line-breaking and indentation,
• look for paragraphs with just one or two words on the last line, and rewrite them to make them a line shorter,
• hunt down bibliographic entries that go on too long, and shorten Transactions to Trans., November to Nov., etc.

It’s amazing how much mileage you can get out of these silly tricks. Now it’s at the point where if certain key paragraphs need one more word inserted, the whole thing spills onto page 11.

This is a new field for me. I’ve read a fair bit, but still it’s strange and scary to be submitting somewhere that I don’t recognize any of the names on the program committee. (No offense folks, if any referees look me up and read this!) I had an idea that was vaguely related to compiler implementation, but actually could be generalized to a different field, and that seemed the best place for it. Plus this work was far more accessible to my M.S. students — one of them is my co-author — than any of my work on type theory. There’s something to be said for that. I don’t think I’ll post any version of the paper here until I hear whether it is accepted, but for the curious I put a poster online some time ago — with very preliminary data — that describes much of the result.

Opinions are like a**holes

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Wednesday 31 May 2006 @15:24

To me, one of the great things about the explosion of writing on the Internet is that we don’t need to formulate our own opinions on anything anymore. No matter what opinion you’d produce, on any topic, most likely someone out there has already expressed it; all you need do is adopt it.

This leads to a kind of shopping experience: whenever you encounter a new topic of debate, rather than carefully considering the facts and drawing your own conclusions, just Google for others’ opinions and decide who you agree with. Easy peasy!

Take all of the above as facetious, if you prefer. I’m not yet certain how serious I am. (Which reminds me of The Simpsons: in Homerpalooza, one teenager says to another, “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” “I don’t even know anymore.”)

We may think it would be a better world if everyone’s opinions were independently researched and thoroughly considered, but that is unrealistic. And shopping around for opinions from diverse sources is perhaps far better than getting all your opinions from one source, whether it be your church, parents, political party, or home-town newspaper.

Example: I’m basically pro-choice, but mostly because people I trust tend to have that point of view. Personally, I have a hard time caring about the issue much either way. I will never get pregnant because I don’t have the right apparatus. And I will never get anyone pregnant because, well, I’m a Kinsey 6 and in sexual terms, women are about as appealing as Jabba the Hutt. Pretty effective contraceptive, that.

If anything, maybe parents ought to be permitted to extinguish their children until they’re 3 or 4 years old. Ah, but I jest. (I think.) And anyway, many folks who do slaughter their kids appear to be the same brand of fundamentalists who get all huffy over abortion.

This all started with me browsing magazines on amazon.com, and wondering if I am missing anything by relying solely on the Internet and not subscribing to opinions in print. It might be nice to receive some glossy monthly tome packed with various atheist-progressive-rationalist-libertarian-humanist-determinist points of view.

There are a few candidates, but it’s hard to tell which I would like best: Reason, Free Inquiry, Skeptical Inquirer, Skeptic, American Atheist, Mother Jones, Liberty, American Prospect, etc. I should try to skim some of these next time I’m at the book store.

Writing about technology for posterity

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Friday 19 May 2006 @17:39

My last post contained some technical details about my laptop and its memory configuration. If that post is still accessible on the web years from now—as is my intent—I have to assume it will sound absolutely ridiculous.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s revisit an old email message. I have archives of email dating back to 1991, and I occasionally browse them for grins and nostalgia. Here is a message my friend sent me in 1994:

From: mbp@…
To: league@…
Subject: Argh.
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 1994 18:19:50 -0400 (EDT)

[person] just showed me his new toy. A notebook, with active matrix color VGA screen 500 MB hard disk, internal 14.4K FAX/modem, and… get this… 486DX4/75 CPU. Puppy weighs less than 7 lbs. And is literally the size of a notebook. Amazing color, etc., etc.

He said something about $6000, and I’m pinching pennies to even CONSIDER a $150 modem. (or a $150 or $250 CPU)

Ah, those halcyon days when we were impressed by a 7 pound laptop for 6 grand. Progress, eh?