Classical compound

Classical compounds represent a significant source of Neo-Latin vocabulary. Moreover, since these words are composed from classical languages whose prestige is or was respected throughout the Western European culture, these words typically appear in many different languages. Their widespread use makes technical writing generally accessible to readers who may only have a smattering of the language in which it appears.

Not all Western European languages have been equally receptive to classical technical compounds. German and Russian, for instance, have historically attempted to create their own technical vocabularies from native elements. Usually, these creations are German and Russian calques on the international vocabulary, such as Wasserstoff and "водород" (vodoród) for hydrogen. Like any exercise in language prescription, this endeavour has been only partially successful, so while official German may still speak of a Fernsprecher, public telephones will be labelled with the internationally recognized Telefon.

These words are compounds formed from Latin and Ancient Greek root words. Ancient Greek words are almost invariably romanized (see transliteration of Ancient Greek into English). In English:

• Ancient Greek αι becomes e or sometimes æ/ae in British English;
• Ancient Greek groups with γ plus a velar stop consonant such as γγ, γκ or γξ become ng, nc (or nk in more recent borrowings) and nx respectively;
• Ancient Greek ει often becomes i (occasionally it is retained as ei);
• Ancient Greek θ becomes th;
• Ancient Greek κ becomes c (subject to palatalization in English pronunciation) or k;
• Ancient Greek οι becomes e or sometimes œ/oe in British English;
• Ancient Greek ου usually becomes u, or occasionally ou;
• Ancient Greek ῥ (rho with spiritus asper) becomes rh;
• Ancient Greek υ becomes y;
• Ancient Greek φ becomes ph or, very rarely, f;
• Ancient Greek χ becomes ch;
• Ancient Greek ψ becomes ps;
• Ancient Greek ω becomes o;
• Ancient Greek rough breathing becomes h-.

Thus, for example, Ancient Greek σφιγξ becomes English (and Latin) sphinx. Exceptions to these romanizing rules occur, such as leukemia (leukaemia); compare leukocyte, also leucocyte. In Latin, and in the target languages, the Greek vowels are given their classical values rather than their contemporary values in demotic Greek.

Ancient Greek words often contain consonant clusters which are foreign to the phonology of contemporary English and other languages that incorporate these words into their lexicon: diphthong; pneumatology, phthisis. The traditional response in English is to treat the unfamiliar cluster as containing one or more silent letters and suppress their pronunciation, more modern speakers tend to try and pronounce the unusual cluster. This adds to the irregularities of English spelling; moreover, since many of these words are encountered in writing more often than they are heard spoken, it introduces uncertainty as to how to pronounce them when encountered.

Classical compounds frequently vary their stressed syllable when suffixes are added: ágriculture, agricúltural. This also gives rise to uncertainty when these words are encountered in print. Once a classical compound has been created and borrowed, it typically becomes the foundation of a whole series of related words: e.g. astrology, astrological, astrologer/astrologist/astrologian, astrologism.

Mainstream medical New Latin and ISV pronunciation in English is not the same as Classical Latin pronunciation. Like Ecclesiastical Latin, it has a regularity of its own, and individual sounds can be mapped or compared. Although the Classical Latin pronunciation of venae cavae would be approximately /ˈwɛnaɪˈkɑːwaɪ/, the standard English medical pronunciation is /ˈviːniːˈkeɪviː/.

English began incorporating many of these words in the sixteenth century; geography first appeared in an English text in 1535. Other early adopted words that still survive include mystagogue, from the 1540s, and androgyne, from the 1550s. The use of these technical terms predates the scientific method; the several varieties of divination all take their names from Classical compounds, such as alectryomancy, divination by the pecking of chickens.

Not all English writers have been friendly to the inflow of Classical vocabulary. The Tudor period writer Sir John Cheke wrote:

I am of this opinion that our own tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borrowing of other tunges; wherein if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.

and therefore rejected what he called "inkhorn terms".

Similar sentiments moved the nineteenth century author William Barnes to write "pure English," in which he avoided Greco-Latin words and find Anglo-Saxon equivalents therefor: for Barnes, the newly invented art of the photograph became a sun-print. Unlike this one, some of Barnes's coinages caught on, such as foreword, Barnes's replacement for the preface of a book. Later, Poul Anderson wrote a jocular piece called Uncleftish Beholding in a constructed language based on English which others have called "Ander-Saxon"; this attempted to create a pure English vocabulary for nuclear physics. For more information, see Linguistic purism in English.

Many such words, such as thermometer, dinosaur, rhinoceros, and rhododendron, are thoroughly incorporated into the English lexicon and are the ordinary words for their referents. Some are prone to colloquial shortening; rhinoceros often becomes rhino. The binomial nomenclature of taxonomy and biology is a major source for these items of vocabulary; for many unfamiliar species that lack a common English name, the name of the genus becomes the English word for that life form.

In the metric system, prefixes that indicate multipliers are typically Greek in origin, such as kilogram, while those that indicate divisors are Latin, as in millimeter: the base roots resemble Greek words, but in truth are neologisms. These metric and other suffixes are added to native English roots as well, resulting in creations such as gigabyte. Words of mixed Latin and Greek lineage, or words that combine elements of the classical languages with English – so-called hybrid words – were formerly castigated as "barbarisms" by prescriptionist usage commentators; this disapproval has mostly abated. Indeed, in scientific nomenclature, even more exotic hybrids have appeared, such as for example the dinosaur Yangchuanosaurus. Personal names appear in some scientific names such as Fuchsia.

Classical compounds are sometimes used to lend grandeur or the impression of scientific rigour to humble pursuits: the study of cosmetology will not help anyone become an astronaut. Compounds along these models are also sometimes coined for humorous effect, such as odontopodology, the science of putting your foot into your mouth. These humorous coinages sometimes take on a life of their own, such as garbology, the study of garbage.

Some classical compounds form classical plurals, and are therefore irregular in English. Others do not, while some vacillate between classical and regular plurals.

There are hundreds of classical compounds in English and other European languages. As traditionally defined, they cannot stand alone as free words, but there are many exceptions to this rule, and in the late 20th century such forms are increasingly used independently: bio as a clipping of biography, telly as a respelt clipping of television. Most classical compounds translate readily into everyday language, especially nouns: bio- as ‘life’ -graphy as ‘writing, description’. Because of this, the compounds of which they are part (usually classical or learned compounds) can be more or less straightforwardly paraphrased: biography as ‘writing about a life’, neurology as ‘the study of the nervous system’. Many classical compounds are designed to take initial or final position: autobiography has the two initial or preposed forms auto-, bio-, and one postposed form -graphy. Although most occupy one position or the other, some can occupy both: -graph- as in graphology and monograph; -phil- as in philology and Anglophile. Occasionally, the same base is repeated in one word: logology the study of words, phobophobia the fear of fear.

From the Renaissance until the mid-20th century, the concept of derivational purity has generally regulated the use of classical compounds: Greek with Greek, Latin with Latin, and a minimum of hybridization. Biography is Greek, agriculture Latin, but television is a hybrid of Greek tele- and Latin -vision (probably so coined because the ‘pure’ form telescope had already been adopted for another purpose). Most dictionaries follow the Oxford English Dictionary in using combining form (comb. form) to label such classical elements, but the name is not widely known. In appendices to dictionaries and grammar books, classical compounds are often loosely referred to as roots or affixes: ‘a logo …, properly speaking, is not a word at all but a prefix meaning word and short for logogram, a symbol, much as telly is short for television’ (Montreal Gazette, 13 Apr. 1981). They are often referred to as affixes because some come first and some come last, but if they were affixes, a word like biography would have no base whatever. While affixes are grammatical (like prepositions), classical compounds are lexical (like nouns, adjectives, and verbs): for example, bio- translates as a noun (life), -graphy as a verbal noun (writing). They are also often loosely called roots because they are ancient and have a basic role in word formation, but functionally and often structurally they are distinct from roots: the -graph in autograph is both a root and a classical compound, while the -graphy in cryptography consists of root -graph- and suffix -y, and is only a classical compound.

In East Asia, a similar role to Latin and Greek has been played by Chinese, with non-Chinese languages both borrowing a significant number of words from Chinese and using morphemes borrowed from Chinese to coin new words, particularly in formal or technical language. See Sino-Japanese vocabulary, Sino-Korean vocabulary, and Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary for discussion.

The coinage of new native terms on Chinese roots is most notable in Japanese, where it is referred to as wasei kango (和製漢語, Japanese-made Chinese-words). Many of these have been subsequently borrowed into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese, with the same (or corresponding) characters being pronounced differently according to language, just as happens in European languages – compare English biology and French biologie.

For example, 自動車 (Japanese jidōsha, Korean jadongcha, Mandarin zìdòngchē) is a Japanese-coined word meaning “automobile”, literally self-move-car; compare to auto (self) + mobile (moving).

Topics

• English words of Greek origin
• Hybrid word
• Interlingua
• International scientific vocabulary
• Internationalism (linguistics)
• -ism
• Latin influence in English
• -ology
• Sino-xenic vocabularies, for similar constructs in Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc.

Lists

• List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents in English
• List of Greek and Latin roots in English
• List of Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names
• List of Latin words with English derivatives

• McArthur, Tom (ed.): The Oxford Companion to the English Language, (Oxford University Press, 1992). ISBN 0-19-214183-X
• Plag, Ingo "Word-Formation in English", Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN à0521525632, 9780521525633

• Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language 1998 entries on classical compound and combining form