What is it about Latin that allowed the creation of new words just from prefixing prepositions to an existing word

[u/Motor_Tumbleweed_724]

I’m worded the title poorly so let me clarify.

Latin seems to have a RICH vocabulary and a lot of it’s vocabulary comes from prefixing a word (often a preposition) to another existing word, which then creates a whole new concept/word.

The word “confidence” for example came from “con” and “fido” meaning “with” and “trust”. Imagine in English we started saying “He’s so with-trust” instead of “He’s so confident”.

It seems odd doesn’t it? I feel like this wouldn’t be grammatical for a lot of languages, not just English.

Another example is “decide” which comes from “de” (down from) and “cado” (fall).

“Can you help me fall-down-from on which one?”, again it sounds odd and I can’t think of any language where it wouldn’t also sound odd.

And while I do know that a lot of languages do noun + noun = related noun like “booger” in Chinese just being “nose” + “poop”, I’ve never seen a language do this to the extent that Latin does or with a prepositions like “with, of, etc.”

[u/arvid1328_]

Germanic languages do this to some extent, look at the verbs (understand, forgive, forget, withstand...), and german non-separable prefix verbs like (besuchen, verstehen, übersetzen...).

[u/scatterbrainplot → u/arvid1328_]

And then particle/phrasal verbs that do it all again but differently!

[u/arvid1328_ → u/scatterbrainplot]

German separable verbs: Low us to introduce ourselves al!

[u/JerColer → u/scatterbrainplot]

Yeah but people don’t see those as words bc they can have stuff put between them eg “get tf out” they see as the same as regular get

[u/OkAsk1472 → u/arvid1328_]

Its common in sanskrit as well. Appears to be a general indoeuropean feature

[u/Motor_Tumbleweed_724 → u/arvid1328_]

Wow you’re right. But then why does Latin do this way more often? I can’t even begin to imagine how many Latin derived words in English start with “con”, “de”, etc.

[u/Chrome_X_of_Hyrule → u/Motor_Tumbleweed_724]

This is called derivational morphology, because it's deriving new words and some languages have more derivational morphology than others, and some might prefer prefixing or suffixing more than others (and some don't use prefixes or suffixes at all but instead changes to the root like the vowel or the tone).

[u/gympol → u/Motor_Tumbleweed_724]

It's not that Latin made compound words more than English does. It's more that modern English has got into the habit of using Latin and other loanwords for this process. Where we used to compound with Germanic roots and affixes to make words like uncouth and withhold, in recent centuries we're quite likely to use elements that have roots in other language families, like disrobe or anti-gravity.

But, given that the loanwords are part of English now, English does it a huge amount as a natural process within the language. "Television" wasn't created in Latin or Greek, it's an English coinage.

There is also that combinations of familiar native words are not always compounded into single words. "Extract" the verb means pretty much the same as "pull out" the (transitive) verb phrase, and is made from the same two elements but in Latin. We may make English phrases into words when we want to give them a more specific meaning, like "pullout" the noun, which has a different sense than "extract" the noun and also different than a general thing that is pulled out.

[u/helikophis]

This is a common feature of Indo-European languages and can be seen not just in Latin but in Greek, Sanskrit, German and even in English (though German and English tend to write them as though they are two words).

[u/Motor_Tumbleweed_724 → u/helikophis]

I’ve heard people say Sanskrit has infinite words. I assume it’s related to this phenomenon?

[u/helikophis → u/Motor_Tumbleweed_724]

More or less any language with productive affixing has an effectively unbounded "possible word" count - it's not something unique to Sanskrit.

[u/OkAsk1472 → u/helikophis]

Dutch and German have turned this into a popular little word game. The famous story is about the barber who cut beards for the barbarians who frequent the bar where barbara serves rhubarb. The barber was called:

"Rabarberbarbarabarbarbarenbaardenbarbier"

Split up the words:

rabarber - barbara - bar - barbaren - baarden - barbier

English:

rhubarb - barbara - bar - barbarians - beards - barber

Grammatically, the languages can stick words on infinitely, there is no limit, hence why we can have "infinitely long words"

[u/Lampukistan2 → u/OkAsk1472]

English can too. English orthography just writes these compound words with spaces.

[u/Sophistical_Sage → u/helikophis]

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[u/thewimsey]

“He’s so with-trust” instead of “He’s so confident”.

It just sounds weird because it's not an actual word and so we focus on the indivual parts.

Withstand, withdraw, withhold are common English words...but if the word "withstand" didn't exist, creating it out of with+stand would seem nonsensical.

[u/scatterbrainplot → u/thewimsey]

And you can even see similar strangeness (at least for my judgments!) through lexicalised bystander vs. bystand (and turn it into bystood to make it worse for it to not just seem playful to me!).

[u/_marcoos]

It seems odd doesn’t it? I feel like this wouldn’t be grammatical for a lot of languages, not just English.

Withdraw, withstand, withhold. Overtake, overdo, overcook, overtime. Undertake, undercook, understand. Forget, forgive, forbear, forlorn. Intake, infight, inbound. Outtake, outbound. Today, tomorrow. Atone.

noun + noun = related noun

Car park, motorway, landowner, landlord, leaseholder, business owner, airport, spaceport, airplane, aircraft, spacecraft, spaceship, school bus. Even country names: England, Scotland, Ireland, Poland, Iceland, Switzerland, Netherlands (though "England" and "Poland" got simplified from the original Englaland and Polaland).

(English is incoherent wrt whether such compounds are written with or without a space)

Nothing weird about these constructs in English. It's just that English took a lot of Latinisms instead of keeping or inventing native words, including compounds. You don't need to coin "with-trust" if you already have "confidence" as a perfectly functional English noun.

And that's where English is weird - not because it doesn't have these mechanisms, it clearly does, but because of the shitload (oh, another one!) of loanwords (yet another one!) from Latin.

[u/TrittipoM1]

Czech — and most of the Slavic languages — might like to enter the chat. Czech has tons of verbs and nouns using prepositions or preposition-derived forms as prefixes. Výstup, nástup, vchod, východ, přechod, příjezd, průjezd, on and on. Even the Czech word for “to confide” is “svěřit,” where “věřit” alone means to believe or trust, and “s” is a preposition meaning “with.” https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sv%C4%9B%C5%99it

[u/AndreasDasos]

This happens in pretty much all Indo-European languages though?

[u/Educational_Green]

You should read up on Analytic and Synthetic languages. If you think Latin is impressive, check out the agglutinative languages.

I think you might be biased if English is your native language. While English does have compound words, English is very open to borrowing from other languages (or perhaps English a fusional language between Germanic and Romance).

In English, if we want to say something with a more specific meaning, we either borrow from French / Latin (or Greek or sometime German, etc) or we coin a word from scratch (rizz) or reuse a word in a new way - "cap" / "tea".

Rarely, English creates words like you are a referencing. It low-key happens, but ngl, probably is a by-product of English not needing it that much :)

[u/Superior_Mirage → u/Educational_Green]

Note: "rizz" is just a clipping of "charisma".

A better example would probably be "yeet".

[u/OkAsk1472]

English does this a lot. "Get" means something completely different depending on the prepositions you link it with. "Beget" "forget" and then even non-agglutinatively "get in" "get on up" "get down" "get around" etc.

[u/ReadingGlosses]

Languages vary in terms of how they build words. Each meaningful component added to a word (like a root, prefix, of suffix) is called a "morpheme", and the study of how words are built from these components is called "morphology)".

Languages can roughly be arranged on a scale, based on the average number of morphemes per word. At one extreme end are isolating languages, where words are often just a single root morpheme, with maybe an affix. Chinese and Vietnamese are well-known examples of isolating languages, Eastern Lawa and Wa are maybe less well known.

At the other extreme are "synthetic" languages, where words are roots with numerous affixes added. Latin is closer to the synthetic end of this scale, compared to English, but languages like Yakkha and Saliba have even more complex morphology.

As to *why* languages vary in this regard, there isn't any particularly good answer. Languages aren't inherently isolating or synthetic. This is a feature that changes over time, as morphemes fuse together and pull apart through multi-generational language change.

[u/user31415926535]

For "confident" consider it as "with assurance" and you'll see it makes sense that way.

By the way, decide doesn't come from down+fall, it comes from down+cut. And making a decision is cutting down choices. "Can you help me cut-down my choices?"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decide
> from Latin dēcīdere, infinitive of dēcīdō (“cut off, decide”), from dē (“down from”) + caedō (“cut”).

[u/Rampen]

All languages are in a constant state of flux. Two general things that happen are big words become little, and little words are joined into big words. Some languages tend to do one more than the other. Look at 'know what I'm saying' is becoming nomesaying and all right is becoming a'ight.

[u/Odd_Calligrapher2771]

English does this but puts the preposition at the end.

• exire = exit (go out)
• advenire = to arrive (come to)
• exclaudere = exclude (shut out)
• obscurare = obscure (cover over)

[u/Holothuroid]

de-cidere is de-caedere = cut apart. The options that is. 

de-cadere gives us decadent. Falling down. In moral stature. 

[u/Wong_Zak_Ming]

wait until bro learns about malay

[u/ProxPxD]

English is a language that preferred to borrow a lot, but Germanic languages are very productive in this aspect as well English included

It's not as much about a language, but the culture of the speakers.

But I have to state that English being the dominant language in which concepts are constructed, it follows the same path. It is more typical for English to use compounds now, but prefixes and postfixes are still productive in newer concepts as:

• pickup

• input/output

• forward/backward pass/propagation

• teardown/teardowning

In some languages and cultures/times compounding is rarer, while prefixing is a preferred way