Hi there! I've recently found this forum and decided to join you. I'm a 30 y.o. male from Brazil (nobody's perfect) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!, graduated in Portuguese Language and Literature (and a bit of English, too). Currently, I'm having post-graduation classes with a professor I consider *THE* expert in Portuguese language... but forget Grammar rules and everything, he created a logical system to explain everything about the language using graphics. I may create a post about it in the future. I hope to learn a lot from you boys and girls. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! My question is: I'd like to get a list with all/many/most common affixes and radicals of Germanic Languages (no problem if it's only German or English, though). Could anyone here help me with this? I've taken a look at many sites and didn't find anything. :bawl: cheers
That's a pretty big list and it's constantly growing. The Germanic languages are highly synthetic, although English is becoming more analytic as time passes. English incorporates radicals, prefixes and suffixes from multiple languages. To sort them by language and isolate just the authentic Germanic ones would be quite a task. If you just want suffixes and prefixes, there are surely a hundred, perhaps hundreds, including French -able, Greek dys- and Russian -chik. Still, a small group of educated anglophones could probably track down 75% of them in a couple of hours. But root-words... You're talking about thousands, even if you're just limited to those of Germanic origin.
That means English words are becoming smaller as German ones are becoming longer? Oh, I suppose you misunderstood me (or I didn't ask correctly Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!)... I was looking for the most common affixes and roots in German, in English, in Dutsch etc. and not only the English ones sorted by origin. Anyway, I found the "Dictionary of Prefixes, Suffixes, and Combining Forms from Webster's Third New International Dictionary". It's a quite good list (60 pages or so). Although it's only "English", I think it can help me with my study for a while, as I may consider {ly} in English as the German {lich}; or the English {ation} as the German {azion} and so on. Thanks!
