Root (linguistics)

“ A root is not a real word; it is neither a noun, naming something, nor a verb, denoting action. Thus iug-, yoke, does not mean a yoke nor I yoke; it merely suggests something about yoking. The root becomes a real word only when an inflection ending is added, or, more commonly, both a formative suffix and an inflection ending: as, iug-u-m, a yoke.
185. Roots are common to Latin and its cognate languages, such as the Sanskrit and the Greek. When a root is named in this book, the specific Latin form of the root is meant. ”

“ It is the work of grammarians in examining any language to take all its combined words to pieces as far as possible. Greek and Latin grammars now teach how to analyze words by stripping off their affixes, so as to get down to the real part or root, which is generally a simple sound expressing a simple notion. A root is best understood by considering it to have been once a separate word, as it would be in such a language as English. Even in languages where the roots seldom appear without some affix attached, they may stand by themselves as imperative, like Latin dic! ”

“ We call root or radical, whatever, in the words of any language or family of languages, cannot be reduced to a simpler or more original form. It may be well to illustrate this by a few examples. But, instead of taking a number of words in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and tracing them back to their common centre, it will be more instructive if we begin with a root which has been discovered, and follow it through its wanderings from language to language. ”

“ A root ending in a vowel is called a Vowel Root: as, da-, give; a root ending in a consonant is called a Consonant Root: as, rup-, break. Roots are conveniently indicated by the sign √: as, √teg-, to be read ‘root teg-.’
189. A root or a part of a root is sometimes doubled in forming a word; this is called Reduplication: as, mur-mur, murmur; tur-tur, turtle-dove; po-pul-us, people; ul-ul-āre, yell.
PRESENT STEMS AS ROOTS.
190. Many nouns are formed from the present stems of verbs, which take the place of roots. Stems thus used are mostly those of verbs in -āre and -īre. ”

“ It would lead us too far if we tried to collect all the meanings which our roots had in the various ancient Aryan tongues in combination with prepositions. It must suffice to select a small number from a modern language such as French, which give us an idea of the endless modifications to which every root is more or less adapted. ”

“ THE BUILDING OF ENGLISH WORDS.
The root of a word is the shortest form in which it appears. Thus tal, meaning number, speech, is the root of tale, a number counted; tale, a story; tell, narrate; toll, something counted out; talk, discourse.
The root of a word may undergo modification and become a stem. Thus love is the stem of the root lov-, and to this stem are added such inflections as -est, -s, -d, as loves, lovest, loved.
Again, to the root of a word may be added a prefix or suffix, thereby forming a new word called a derivative. ”

“ For the peculiar reduplication ān, belonging to certain roots with initial vowels, see below, 788.
784. A number of roots beginning with va and ending with a single consonant, which in various of their verbal forms and derivatives abbreviate the va to u, do it also in the perfect, and are treated like roots with initial u (above, 783 b) , except that they retain the full form of root in the strong persons of the singular active. ”

“ Philologists usually call such languages 'root-languages,' because a sound complex that carries the essential meaning of a word, apart from all modifying elements, is called by their science a verbal root. ”

“ In our modern languages roots can only be discovered by scientific analysis, and, even as far back as Sanskrit, we may say that no root was ever used as a noun or as a verb. [pg 358] But originally roots were thus used, and in Chinese we have fortunately preserved to us a representative of that primitive radical stage which, like the granite, underlies all other strata of human speech. The Aryan root DÂ, to give, appears in Sanskrit dâ-nam, donum, gift, as a substantive; in do, Sanskrit dadâmi, Greek di-dō-mi, I give, as a verb; but the root DÂ can never be used by itself. ”

“ It is extremely doubtful if any of the root syllables to which we reduce a language belonged to the primitive stock of actual words. They are either products of analysis, reached by stripping off prefixes and suffixes, and by other systematic methods of reducing words to an ideal nucleus which was probably never in use by itself ”

“ An erroneous notion of the development of language has become widely spread through the adoption of the metaphorical term "roots" for the irreducible elements of human speech. Men never talked in roots; they talked in words. Many words of kindred meaning have a part in common, and a root is nothing but that common part stripped of all additions. In some cases it is obvious that one word is derived from another by the addition of a fresh element; in other cases it is impossible to say which of two kindred words is the more primitive. A root is merely a convenient term for an abstraction. ”

“ The root words of the language, whether nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, or adverbs, are generally monosyllabic; where [75] simple roots have more than one syllable, the additions are formative prefixes, once probably separate words, which have become incorporated. Such are the prefix ke-, ki-, kā-, used to form adjectives, present participles, and verbal nouns; and the prefixes ār- (in ārnī, “sun,” ārlòng, “stone,” ārlèng, “man,” etc.) , ing- (in inglòng, “mountain”; inghòn, “pity,” etc.) , and te-, ti-, to- (in teràm, “call,” tekàng, “abandon,” tikup, “house-yard,” tovār, “road,” etc.) ”

“ Some roots have more than one ungraded form; thus radical ā may stand beside radical ō, as in *arā- or *arō- ‘scratch, bite; plough, dig’: Lat. arā-re has F *arā- of the first, Gk. ἄροτρον has R *arə- of the second. The F of both, with ‐d- extension, occurs in Lat. rād-o, rōd-o. Beside ā we have sometimes to assume a, as in Skr. rádati ‘scratches, digs’ (not ə here, which gives i in Skr.) . In many cases all the forms cannot be explained without assuming an alternation of long and short vowel in the root; this may have come about by false analogy. ”

“ These are declined like nouns, of which latter there are six forms, the masculine in â, o, and y, the feminine in a, oo, and e; the plurals being formed exactly as in the pronominal suffixes of the verb. The root-word, without inflexion, alone is used where the name is employed in no connection with a verb, where in every terrestrial language the nominative would be employed. ”

“ Some linguistic scholars go much farther than others in their attempts at analyzing the Indo-European roots, and referring them to more primitive elements; all the methods of secondary origin which we have illustrated above have been sought for and thought to be recognized among them; and there are those who are unwilling to believe that any absolutely original root can have ended otherwise than in a vowel, or begun with more than a single consonant, and who therefore regard all radical syllables not conforming with their norm as the product of composition or fusion with formative elements. ”

“ I say “out of a few simple elements,” for the number of what we call full predicative roots, such as ar, to plough, or spaś, to look, is indeed small.
A root is necessarily monosyllabic. Roots consisting of more than one syllable can always be proved to be derivative roots, and even among monosyllabic roots it is necessary to distinguish between primitive, secondary, and tertiary roots.
A. Primitive roots are those which consist—
(1) of one vowel; for instance, i, to go;
(2) of one vowel and one consonant; for instance, ad, to eat;
(3) of one consonant and one vowel ”

“ It is one of the characteristic features of that family, that, whatever the number of prefixes and suffixes, the root must always stand out in full relief, and must never be allowed to suffer by its contact with derivative elements.
There is one language, the Chinese, in which no analysis of any kind is required for the discovery of its component parts. It is a language in which no coalescence [pg 273] of roots has taken place: every word is a root, and every root is a word. It is, in fact, the most primitive stage in which we can imagine human language to have existed. ”

“ I should not be understood to say that all the so-called roots can be made to yield a secret meaning when analysed. Philologists are not all agreed as to what constitutes a root, or what words are roots, and in this general uncertainty it should not be expected that these correspondences, which as I have said are not complete, will apply in every instance. There are many other things which add to the difficulty; a root is often found to have very many different meanings ”

“ Practically, in the later language, it is as if a compounded root were formed, out of root and prefix, from which then the whole conjugation (with derivatives: below, chap. XVII.) is made, just as from the simple root. Yet, even there (and still more in the older language: 1081 a–c) , the combination is so loose, and the members retain so much of their independent value, that in most dictionaries (that of Sir Monier Williams is an exception) the conjugation of each root with prefixes is treated under the simple root, and not in the alphabetic order of the prefix. ”

“ On practical grounds we retain this method of treating roots, without insisting farther on the point that even with strong roots a radical is often demonstrably of quite recent origin, while on the other hand there is much variety in the origin of weak forms of the root, and while in many cases at least, the assumption of an original Waw or Yod as a radical, or that of a third radical with the same sound as the second, is a pure fiction. ”

“ In the Latin word fero, fer, meaning 'to bear,' is the root from which all modifications of the verb ferre (to carry) are formed by means of suffixal elements. If, therefore, a language consists of sound complexes having the nature of roots, it is called a root-language. As a matter of fact, however, the languages under discussion consist purely of detached, monosyllabic words; the conception 'root,' which itself represents the product of a grammatical analysis of our flectional languages, may only improperly be applied to them. ”

“ To assume that two words of different meanings, just because they sound somewhat alike, must therefore have a common origin, is even in ordinary language the great source of bad etymology. But in children’s language the theory of root-sounds fairly breaks down. Few would venture to assert, for instance, that papa and pap have a common derivation or a common root. All that we can safely say of connexion between them is that they are words related by common acceptance in the nursery language. ”

“ The spoken language, at least in WT, recognises even in four-rooted verbs seldom more than the Perfect root.
32. The Infinitive mood. The syllables པ་ pa or, after the final consonants ང་ ར་ ལ་ and vowels, བ་ wa are added to the root, whereby it assumes all the qualities and powers of a noun. In verbs of more roots than one, each of them can, of course, in this way be converted into a substantive, or, in other words, each tense has its Infinitive, except the Imperative. ”

“ The question whether verbs came first or nouns, may be argued ad infinitum, quite as much as the question whether the egg came first or the chicken. Every sentence requires a subject as well as a predicate. If Professor Romanes approves of my saying that roots stood for any part of speech, just as the monosyllabic expressions of children do, I can only say that if I ever said so, I expressed myself incorrectly. A root never stands for any part of speech, because as soon as it is a part of speech, it is no longer a root. ”

“ If we fully allow that a considerable number of roots have (and must have) sprung from the instinctive principle which we have been endeavouring to illustrate, we have gone very far to show what was the origin of language. For the permutations and combinations of which a very few roots [141] are capable, and the rich variety of applications of which each separate root admits, are almost inconceivable to any who have not, by a study of the subject, rendered themselves familiar with the processes of the human mind. ”

“ For all that is known, many root-words among the Greeks or Jews, or even the simple-looking monosyllables of the Chinese, may during præhistoric ages have travelled as far from their real origin as these English verbs. Thus the roots from which language grows may often be themselves sprung as it were from yet earlier seeds or cuttings, grown at home or imported from abroad, and though in our time words mostly come from the ancient roots, the power of striking new roots is not yet dead. ”

“ Middle-age Latin words, i.e. those formed from a corrupt Latin by the monks of the middle ages. These last appear in French in a modified form, and come into English still further altered in their spelling and pronunciation.
I. In most cases English words of the first class are compounds or derivatives. We have not adopted the roots themselves, but use them only [24] in composition, with some particle or preposition. For example: the Latin root ‘clude’ is never found in English as an independent word, though we have ‘exclude,’ ‘include,’ ‘preclude,’ &c. ”

“ Rule.—In reduplicating a word, remember (1) that the prefix is never altered; (2) that the primary root alone is reduplicated; and (2) that when the accent advances one syllable, owing to the addition of an affix, the first part of the word (i.e. prefix and primary root) is never altered, all changes occurring in the last part of the word. ”