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Rebracketing

Rebracketing (also known as resegmentation or metanalysis) is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one set of morphemes is broken down or bracketed into a different set. For example, hamburger, originally from Hamburg+er, has been rebracketed into ham+burger, and burger was later reused as a productive morpheme in coinages such as cheeseburger. It is usually a form of folk etymology, or may seem to be the result of valid morphological processes.

Rebracketing often focuses on highly probable word boundaries: "a noodle" might become "an oodle", since "an oodle" sounds just as grammatically correct as "a noodle", and likewise "an eagle" might become "a neagle", but "the bowl" would not become "th ebowl" and "a kite" would not become "ak ite".

Technically, bracketing is the process of breaking an utterance into its constituent parts. The term is akin to parsing for larger sentences, but it is normally restricted to morphological processes at the sublexical level, i.e. within the particular word or lexeme. For example, the word uneventful is conventionally bracketed as [un+[event+ful]], and the bracketing [[un+event]+ful] leads to completely different semantics. Rebracketing is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new etymology becomes the conventional norm. The name false splitting, also called misdivision, in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle" examples above).

The name juncture loss may be specially deployed to refer to the case of an article and a noun fusing (such as if "the jar" were to become "(the) thejar" or "an apple" were to become "(an) anapple"). Loss of juncture is especially common in the cases of loanwords and loan phrases in which the recipient language's speakers at the time of the word's introduction did not realize an article to be already present (e.g. numerous Arabic-derived words beginning 'al-' ('the'), including "algorithm", "alcohol", "alchemy", etc.). Especially in the case of loan phrases, juncture loss may be recognized as substandard even when widespread; e.g. "the hoi polloi", where Greek hoi = "the".

As a statistical change within a language within any century, rebracketing is a very weak statistical phenomenon. Even during phonetic template shifts, it is at best only probable that 0.1% of the vocabulary may be rebracketed in any given century.

Rebracketing is part of the process of language change, and often operates together with sound changes that facilitate the new etymology.

Rebracketing is sometimes used for jocular purposes, for example psychotherapist can be rebracketed jocularly as Psycho the rapist, and together in trouble can be rebracketed jocularly as to get her in trouble.[1]

Role in forming new words

Before the increased standardization of the English language in the modern period, many new words entered its lexicon in exactly the way just described. A 15th century English cook may once have said something like: "Ah, I found this ewt and this nadder in my napron while baking numble-pie." A few generations later the cook's descendant would have said: "Ah, I found this newt and this adder in my apron while baking (h)umble-pie." Over the course of time these words were misheard and resegmented: ewt became newt, nadder became adder, napron became apron, numble-pie became (h)umble pie. The force behind these particular resegmentations, and by far the most powerful force behind any such resegmentations in the English language, was the "movable-n" of the indefinite article a(n), of the possessive pronouns my(n) and thy(n), and of the old dative case of the definite article the(n). The biforms no/none, the prepositions in and on, the conditional conjunction an even, the shortened form n (and), and the inflectional endings in -n may also have played a part. Through the process of prothesis, in which the sound at the end of a word is transferred to the beginning of the word following, or conversely aphaeresis, in which the sound at the beginning of a word is transferred to the end of the word preceding, old words were resegmented and new words formed. So through prothesis an ewt became a newt. Conversely through aphaeresis a nadder became an adder, a napron became an apron, and a numble-pie became an (h)umble-pie. Many other words in the English language owe their existence to just this type of resegmentation: e.g., nickname, ninny, namby-pamby, nidiot/nidget, nonce word, nother, and notch through prothesis of n; auger, umpire, orange, eyas, atomy, emony, ouch, and aitch-bone, through aphaeresis of n.[2]

Creation of productive affixes

Many productive affixes have been created by rebracketing, such as -athon from Marathon, -holic from alcoholic, and so on. These unetymological affixes are libfixes.

Examples

Examples of false splitting

In English

For a list of words relating to examples of juncture loss in English, see the English rebracketings category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

As demonstrated in the examples above, the primary reason of juncture loss in English is the confusion between "a" and "an". In Medieval script, words were often written so close together that for some Middle English scholars it was hard to tell where one began and another ended. The results include the following words in English:

In French

In French similar confusion arose between "le/la" and "l'-" as well as "de" and "d'-".

In Dutch

Dutch shares several examples with English, but also has some of its own. Many examples were created by reanalysing an initial n- as part of a preceding article or case ending.

In Arabic

In Arabic the confusion is generally with non-Arabic words beginning in "al-" (al is Arabic for "the").

In Greek

Examples of juncture loss

From Arabic "al"

Perhaps the most common case of juncture loss in English comes from the Arabic al- (mentioned above), mostly via Spanish, Portuguese, and Medieval Latin:

Spanish

Medieval Latin

Other

In Greek

Junctural metanalysis played a role in the development of new words in the earliest period of Greek literature: during the oral transmission of the Homeric epics. Many words in the Homeric epics that are etymologically inexplicable through normal linguistic analysis begin to make some sense when junctural metanalysis at some stage in the transmission is assumed: e.g., the formula eche nedumos hypnos "sweet sleep held (him)" appears to be a resegmentation of echen edumos hypnos. Steve Reece has discovered several dozen similar instances of metanalysis in Homer, thereby shedding new light on their etymologies.[10]

Juncture loss is common in later Greek as well, especially in place names, or in borrowings of Greek names in Italian and Turkish, where particles (εις, στην, στον, σε) are fused with the original name.[11][12][13] In the Cretan dialect, the se- prefix was also found in common nouns, such as secambo or tsecambo < se- + cambo 'a plain'.[14]

Examples:

See also

Notes

  1. ^ See p. 146 in Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2003), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Palgrave Macmillan.
  2. ^ For examples of resegmentation in Middle English in various phonetic environments, see Steve Reece, Junctural Metanalysis in Middle English, in Reece, Steve, Homer's Winged Words (Leiden: Brill, 2009) 15-26. Also Reece, Steve, "Some Homeric Etymologies in the Light of Oral-Formulaic Theory," Classical World 93.2 (1999) 185-199.https://www.academia.edu/30641357/Some_Homeric_Etymologies_in_the_Light_of_Oral-Formulaic_Theory
  3. ^ John McWhorter (2003). The Power of Babel: A natural history of language. Harper Perennial. ISBN 9780060520854.
  4. ^ Ti Alkire, Carol Rosen (2010). Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction, p. 305.
  5. ^ Pierre, Alexandre (1983). "Langue arabe et kiswahili" [Arabic and Kiswahili]. Langue arabe et langues africaines [Arabic and African languages] (in French). Conseil international de la langue française. pp. 9–10. ISBN 9782853191258. ainsi kitabu كتاب "livre" est interprété /ki-tabu/ avec pluriel /vi-tabu/.
  6. ^ Harper, Douglas. "methanol". Online Etymology Dictionary.
  7. ^ Harper, Douglas. "genome". Online Etymology Dictionary.
  8. ^ "orange n.1 and adj.1". Oxford English Dictionary online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. Retrieved 2013-09-30.(subscription required)
  9. ^ Euboea#Name
  10. ^ Reece, Steve (2009). Homer's Winged Words: The Evolution of Early Greek Epic Diction in the Light of Oral Theory. Leiden and Boston: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-17441-2. Also, Reece, Steve, "Some Homeric Etymologies in the Light of Oral-Formulaic Theory," Classical World 93.2 (1999) 185-199. Some Homeric Etymologies in the Light of Oral-Formulaic Theory
  11. ^ a b Bourne, Edward G. (1887). "The Derivation of Stamboul". American Journal of Philology. 8 (1). The Johns Hopkins University Press: 78–82. doi:10.2307/287478. JSTOR 287478.
  12. ^ Marek Stachowski, Robert Woodhouse, "The Etymology of İstanbul: Making Optimal Use of the Evidence" Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia 20: 221–245 (2015) doi:10.4467/20843836SE.15.015.2801
  13. ^ a b c C. Desimoni, V. Belgrano, eds., "Atlante Idrografico del Medio Evo posseduto dal Prof. Tammar Luxoro, Pubblicata a Fac-Simile ed Annotato", Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, Genoa, 1867 5:103 cf. Luxoro Atlas
  14. ^ a b Thomas Abel Brimage Spratt, Travels and Researches in Crete, 1865, chapter XIX, p. 201
  15. ^ Detailed history at Pylos#Name

References

Etymology:

Dictionaries: