Link to a dictionary entry, please. Why would it have to fix them? No, it's ineffable for me to answer that.
Um, YOU said it: "tange" = touch. (Hence my quote marks). Because it's an annoying inconsistency! Pfft. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tangere You're either crazy then, or a closet theist! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! If there's no God - why fret about inconsistencies?
Exactly. It's like tenable, the root word is foreign but translates directly to a viable (can I vi it?) English word. Crazy possibly. On the other hand I do enjoy playing with the inconsistencies...
I relish my irrationalities. If there is an annoyance or perceived inconsistency can that not lead to investigation from which a discovery is made? If one is satisfied with the status quo then there's no progress...
Aren't you fortunate! Which is how suffering makes the world go round. Duh. There are more motivations for progress than just dissatisfaction with how things currently are. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
In the end isn't all progress a change in status quo? A result of why don't we do it this way, instead?
"Beautiful" is (or should be) obviously beauty-full: full of beauty. Like wonderful, awful (awe-full), bountiful, merciful, artful, plentiful (which always struck me as redundant). Latin durus means "hard" so durare means to be (or become) hard, i.e. to last. Indurare means to make something hard, which became endurer in French, but when we borrowed the word as "endure" we changed the meaning slightly. Would that be autoduncification? Maybe if we limit it to transitive verbs. What would "sleepable" or "dieable" (dyable?) mean? With that possible exception, the point is made that attachment of the suffix -able/ible is a living inflection. Anglophones understand that it has a more-or-less precise meaning and can be added to almost any verb to build an adjective that every other anglophone will understand. This puts it almost in the class with the plural suffix -s or the gerund suffix -ing. Other morphemes come close, such as -worthy. Perhaps no one has ever called someone "killworthy," but I'm sure you all know what it means. Well sure, since -abilis/ibilis is a Latin suffix. In fact it's the word "able" (habilis) which we also imported as a stand-alone. No, as I noted earlier durare means "to last" while indurare means "to make something hard so it will last," but we muddled the meaning when we took it from Norman French. No again. It's from ami, "friend," and means "friendly." If someone is amiable you can befriend them. Ami is from Latin amicus, and we also have a more original Latin version of the same word, "amicable." And of course amicus is derived from amare, to love. Stay tuned. Now that FaceBook has turned "friend" into a verb (and invented its opposite, "unfriend,") I'm sure it won't be more than a few weeks before the new adjectives "friendable" and "unfriendable" show up in the newspaper. Exactly, and that is indeed a fairly good definition. It does not mean "lovable." As I said above, we are free to add -able/ible to any verb so long as what we come up with makes sense. It might not be accepted in a Cambridge doctoral thesis, and even in America you'd better say the word out loud in several contexts to make sure you haven't inadvertently made a joke, but coinages like that tend to be accepted unremarkably. "Delight" looks like a respectable English word of Anglo-Saxon origin, with that silent "GH." But it's a whimsical respelling of "delite," which is from the old French verb delitier, which in turn is (perhaps you've guessed this by now) the Latin word delectare. Same root as "delectable." Tangere is Latin for "touch," as in "tangent": a straight line that touches a curve but does not cross it. So "tangible" means something of the material world which can be touched. Effare means "to speak out." But if something is F-able, I suppose you could F it. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! "Viable" is the other use of the suffix. It's from French vie, "life," ultimately from Latin vivere, "to live." So it means "capable of living," not "capable of being lived in/with," for which we say "livable." So you find inconsistencies playable. And irrationalities relishable.
Not really! To make a fool of oneself is to put oneself in a position to deserve criticism, while not necessarily realizing it immediately.
'Such that is able to sleep' and 'such that is able to die.' But we already have some other adjectives for this kind of meanings derived from intransitive verbs - "mortal." And there is "killable." Not just Anglophones. Anyone whose first language(s) has a rich flexion can recognize this pattern in other languages as well. In some languages, verb pairs can be made to express the relation transitivity-intransitivity via the adding of affixes. This formation is not very productive in English. But it partly exists in German (e.g. schiessen - erschiessen) and much more so in Slavic languages and Latin. (Other verb pairs, or groups, such as by verb aspect can also be made with the adding of affixes.) Surely you can understand expressions like In the spring, the leaves on the trees green ('the leaves on the trees become green') I engreened the the clay pot I made ('I painted it with green color') Duh. So I skipped a phase in the development of the word. Doesn't change the fact that I was right. A friend is lovable, or at least should be!
I know that.. I just didn't know what you meant. But I guess you meant that I made a fool of myself by saying "Here's hoping I didn't make a fool of myself."
No. By that time I'd completely lost the thread and was just having fun with the words. Welcome to Linguistics. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
