Strand 2/Morphology - Part 8: Verbal Affixes Follow-Up (an -ate problem)

Beth’s astute students may have noticed when making this fine chart that there were some inconsistencies with the -ate suffixes. I have noted in previous posts that, in general, affixes attach to one part of speech and result in another part of speech. -Ate, however, complicates that claim.

Let’s see what they found. They discovered that -ate attaches to adjectives and results in verbs.

activate: active (A) + ate = activate (V)
validate: valid (A) + ate = validate (V)

Oh, but -ate also seems to attach to nouns to make verbs.

motivate: motive (N) + ate = motivate (V)
originate: origin (N) + ate = originate (V)

And mostly, it seems to attach to non-words (bound roots) to make verbs.

frustrate
dominate
emaciate
integrate
legislate
educate
saturate

And then there are these which are all adjectives, not verbs. And the -ate in this set attaches to nouns (fortune), verbs (consider), and bound roots:

fortunate
considerate
desolate
separate
desperate

Notice the pronunciation of the -ate is different in these, with a reduced, schwa vowel.

So what’s going on? Dictionary.com has this to say about the affix –ate:

a suffix occurring in loanwords from Latin. The form originated as a suffix added to a certain class of Latin verbs to form adjectives (fortunate). The resulting word could also be used independently as a nouns (advocate) and came to be used as a stem on which a could be formed (separate, advocate, agitate). In English the use as a verbal suffix has been extended to stems of non-Latin origin: calibrate.

But try to have your students figure out the various patterns first. A rough lesson plan for this is here with some answers provided here. It includes heading to the dictionary to find out more about the history of this suffix. The Online Etymology Dictionary has this to say about -ate:

a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -atus, -atum (e.g. estate, primate, senate). Those that came to English via Old and Middle French often arrived with -at, but an -e was added after c.1400 to indicate the long vowel.

The suffix also can mark adjectives, formed from Latin past participles in -atus, -ata (e.g. desolate, moderate, separate), again, they often were adopted in Middle English as -at, with an -e appended after c.1400

So, many of those that attach to roots were just a past participial marker on a word, like these (all from Online Etymology Dictionary):

educate: from Latin educatus, past participle of educare "bring up, rear, educate".

confiscate: from Latin confiscatus, past participle of confiscare, from com- "together" (see com-) + fiscus "public treasury," literally "money basket".

saturate: from Latin saturatus, past participle of saturare "to fill full, sate, drench," from satur "sated, full," from PIE root *sa- "to satisfy".

And some are faux suffixes, such as legislate, which is a backformation from legislation.

An investigation of this affix is a good example of why we should trust our instincts and when they tip us off that something is up, we should be prepared to conduct some analysis. That is, when there are differing answers and students express doubt about their choices (about a part of speech or something else), that’s a superb indicator that there is something to be investigated. When Beth’s students were going through this, perhaps they hesitated on labeling the part of speech of valid (which they labeled as a noun) because motive was the word preceding, which they had correctly labeled as a noun. They were working under the assumption that affixes always attach to the same part of speech, so they labeled valid as a noun as well. But I’d bet that there was some hesitation in doing so. And that’s because it’s in fact an adjective, and that, as we’ve seen above, -ate attaches to all kinds of things.

So thanks for the fabulous chart, Beth’s class, and I look forward to seeing your adjective one!

Strand 2/Morphology - Part 5: The Grimm Brothers Make a Discovery or Why Sound Change Matters

This delightful “onion” video by Gina Cooke offers some surprising etymological connections, but it also demonstrates how sound change is often at play and can reveal relationships among words. (She’ll have you consider in the video, for example, how the s of one, onion, and alone are pronounced very differently even though the words actually are related.) Of course, we can’t possibly undertake a study of all of the sound changes that affected English for the last many hundreds of years. We can, however, look at a few that affected a great many words in systematic ways, thus revealing connections among words that we might not otherwise have noticed. The change known as Grimm’s Law, for example, actually affected the whole Germanic branch of languages (before there even was a language we call English). This change affected Dutch, German, Frisian, Swedish, and a bunch of others.

Jacob Grimm (who, along with his brother William collected the tales that became known as Grimm’s fairy tales) noticed that when there were certain sounds in Latin, there were certain other sounds in the Germanic languages, including English. In 1822, he published these sound correspondences, which then became known as Grimm’s Law. Here they are.

b → p
d → t
g → k

p → f
t → th
k → h

And there were some other ones, but I include these since they are the ones that are most useful for our purposes. Because English, later in its life, borrowed so many words from Latin, Greek, and French, there are a great many words that are of non-Germanic origin that did not, therefore, undergo the Grimm’s Law sound shift (since it only affected the Germanic languages). For example, we have the English word tooth and the Latin root dent-, of dentist, dental, dentures, etc. So those "d"s turned into "t"s in English, but stayed "d"s in the languages that English later borrowed from. Some other examples:

d-t: decimal – ten, rodent - rat
g-k: grain – corn (remember we’re talking sound not spelling here)
p-f: patriarch – father
t-th: triple – three
k-h: cardiac – heart, cornucopia, unicorn - horn
b-p: bacillus – peg
(Ok, so there must be a better example of this b-p correspondence. A bacillus is “a straight rod-shaped bacterium that requires oxygen for growth”, according to Merriam-Webster. Hmm.)

And if you compare other non-Germanic words from, say modern French and Spanish, with English ones, you can see the evidence for these sound changes here too; the word deux in French or dos in Spanish, both meaning ‘two.’ Or the words père in French or padre in Spanish, both meaning ‘father’. It’s pretty cool!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This Grimm’s Law diversion is an example of the importance of some sound changes to understanding connections among words, and it isn’t necessarily best introduced at this point to your students. Or maybe it is. Let me know. We should probably just investigate some basic morphological patterns first and put aside sound for now. So on to verbs - and maybe adjectives.