Talk:Tmesis

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About "a whole nother" vs "another": Why do you say it's epenthesis? It seems to me that "a whole nother" is a reanalysis of "another" as "a nother", where "nother" is a free morpheme.

I'm not sure if it really qualifies as tmesis, then, but I think epenthesis is way off. Thoughts?

Quincy 00:33, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * I'm with you that "a-whole-nother" is probably actually "a whole 'nother" and thus an example of aphesis, not tmesis or epenthesis.
 * Similarly, I think "what-place-soever" ought be removed. Googling yields mostly archaic results, e.g. KJV quotes, from a time when "soever" was a common word on its own, used "with generalizing or emphatic force".  Take this 1580 example given in the OED, "The feare of what punishment temporal soever".  More likely "what" and "soever" are meant as entirely separate words, not as one word with "punishment temporal" inserted in the middle, eh?
 * I'll go ahead and remove both these examples if no one objects. The article has enough others to survive without these.--Severinus 05:40, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and rem'd those examples since no one seemed to object... -- Severinus 07:12, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

em...
Shouldnt this article mention at least one swear-related Tmesis. Its by far the more common example of this phenomenon than the weak examples here

Why in hell would anyone begin a word with tm? lysdexia 07:05, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * I dunno, sounds good tme! 68.174.97.122 (talk) 19:05, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

or more precisely, why would anyone transliterate greek using tm, since i doubt they pronounced it that way... though they did have some weird prefixes that only work mid-word, like ptero... diptera is easy to pronounce, but pterodactyl is not. ^^'

^^^^^

While there is some controversy surrounding how ancient greeks actually pronounced stuff, for the specific letters Τ and Μ, all scholars unanimously agree that they were pronounced exactly as transliterated in the above example. For what it's worth, they are pronounced the same way even today by native speakers of the language who have no problem pronouncing the word τμησις. Clearly, what is easy to pronounce and what isn't, in terms of sequences of phthongs (try pronouncing that! :P), whether in the middle of a word or at the start, depends on what your native language is. In fact we could have been spared of all those "scientific" pronounciations of classical greek (as the Erasmian pronunciation) if those researchers had been careful not to extrapolate stuff from what seems natural in the contect of their own native languages.

144.32.81.175 16:35, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Scunthorpe? ed g2s • talk 02:29, 17 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Greek words starting with two consonants (ps-, pt- and others) are usually zero grades - see Indo-European ablaut. As such they make perfect philological sense, and yes, they were pronounced that way. --Doric Loon (talk) 18:57, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

how heinous e'er
I removed
 * * "how heinous e'er it be" (Shakespeare's tmesis of "however" in Richard II)

since WS's intent seems to be "no matter how heinous it turns out to be", and "ever" has the force of "always" and thus "anyway". In fact, we should cite evidence that English of that vintage treated "however" as a single word, rather than having "how ever", "what ever", "when ever", etc. as two word phrases that had not yet fused into our corresponding familiar single words.
 * the construction makes grammatical sense without assuming it is derived from "however", and
 * it is in complete contrast to all the other examples, and needs to be discussed as an exception to the pattern they evidence, if it is in fact itself an example.

It may be an example, but there is more work needed to show that, and still more to fit it into the article in that case. --Jerzy•t 03:57, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Adjustment of Offensive Language
>Shouldnt this article mention at least one swear-related Tmesis. Its by far the more common >example of this phenomenon than the weak examples here

The point is about offending and thereby hurting others with imprudent use of language, not how common insults are infixed or how strong or weak it may be. Keep in mind that this page is meant for a general readers; that includes children. Apeman 18:51, 16 April 2007 (UTC)


 * No, this page is meant for people who have read and understand Wikipedia's disclaimers, notably Content disclaimer. It's one thing to remove needless profanity, but when the profanity is essential to the article (as it is in this case — expletive infixation is a very prominent form of tmesis in English), it remains. —RuakhTALK 20:30, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree with Ruakh. Wikipedia is not censored, nor should it be.  --Cromwellt|talk|contribs 15:16, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I wholeheartedly agree that this article shouldn't be censored, particularly considering that modern-day tmesis is so often swearing-oriented, but I do think it's unnecessary and gratuitious to have to "X-fuckin'-X" examples when neither one of them is a cited example from literature. I would recommend deleting "Congratu-fuckin'-lations", another expletive infixation, as it doesn't seem to serve any purpose.  SRBAndrews 10:30, 18 Feb 2008  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.114.144.229 (talk)
 * I remain unconvinced that profanity--particularly in the scale in this article--is "essential" to it. Not true at all. There is a failure here to recognize audience, and a failure to respect others. It is not reasonable to require or believe that users of Wikipedia consider themselves having "read and understand Wikipedia's disclaimers." They are actually far more likely to be people who have googled a word and click on a link to this article, going directly to it. Whether or not you think this article should be only for people who have read and understood the disclaimers, in real life, those are not the people reading it. I disagree with you, and I think your position potentially harms people. And I think the root of this is not really about freedom or legal rights, though they may be on your side, much less a belief that offensive language is necessary to illustrate an offensive usage, but about a carelessness for others who may not subscribe to your values.Apeman (talk) 03:11, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

incorrect application
All my searches have found that tmesis is restricted to the insertion of a word or words between the elements of a compound word. It does not apply to cases where an infix is inserted between the syllables of a word that is not a compound. --EncycloPetey 18:45, 27 October 2007 (UTC)


 * This is correct. All the examples of expletive infixation in English on this page are incorrect. The basic function of tmesis is to undo some form of (usually bound) compound and allow the individual elements to function as separate syntactic entities. This differs from infixation (including expletive infixation) which does not (necessarily) depend on morphemes and does not create separate syntactic entities.


 * In other words, the result of tmesis is two separate words which can be separated by more or less anything, while the result of infixation is a single word with something squished into the middle. Kokoshneta (talk) 17:07, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Split infinitive
Someon has added to our article on the split infinitive a note that the Latin infinitive could be split by tmesis. If that is true, it would be really useful to have an example of it here - in fact we could do with a whole section on Latin, if the phenomenon really does occur. --Doric Loon (talk) 18:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Examples Organization
It seems the examples are not sorted in any significant way. Alphabetical of the phrase seems to be the most readily apparent solution. -- 66.212.222.254 (talk) 15:20, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

The man in the car's hat
Are constructions exemplified by "the man in the car's hat" viewed as tmesis? It would appear so, because the prepositional phrase "in the car" has been inserted into "man's". This is a moderately frequent construction in English, so it should go in the article unless for some reason it's considered to be in a different category. Duoduoduo (talk) 22:17, 1 July 2011 (UTC)


 * No. The English possessive marker 's is simply a clitic. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:41, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Other English examples
Are these examples in English considered to be tmesis?:

Duoduoduo (talk) 22:29, 1 July 2011 (UTC)
 * "whatsoever" and "whosoever", with "so" inserted in "whatever" and "whoever"
 * "take it over", as an example of an extremely large category of separable phrasal verbs, which have a meaning not contained in the bare verb, in which an object pronoun (and sometimes optionally a short noun phrase object) is inserted between the bare verb and the particle

German separable verbs?
Are German separable verbs considered an example of tmesis? They consist of a prefix plus a root verb, and when they separate the root verb occurs, then intervening words, then the prefix. Duoduoduo (talk) 22:37, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Stephen Fry
The example involving Stephen Fry is dated June 2011, however there is an earlier verifiable instance dating back to 2003 where he gives examples of tmesis -- in the 4th episode of series A of the television show QI. It's described on the corresponding wiki page. Bigblah (talk) 10:41, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

In larger chunks
Will Self used 'dramatic tmesis' to refer to the interpolation of whole play within two parts of another. Is this standard usage? 58.153.178.87 (talk) 13:17, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

duplication of syllable probably occurs in the insertion, no?
wouldn't the duplicating syllable rule be better expressed as insertion of a nonsense word constructed from the neighboring phonetic sound, such as "'W-eldiddly-elcome" or "'Wel-diddlyel-come" rather than "'Wel-diddly-elcome" which implies the the duplication is a separate event? can probably deduce more about what is going on with more examples and checking stressed/unstressed, voiced/unvoiced and the other usual suspects. 68.174.97.122 (talk) 19:10, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Greek example
Unlike the Latin example circum virum dare, the Ancient Greek example kata dakrua leibōn is AFAIK a true example of tmesis, as dakrua cannot be considered the complement of kata: the tears are shed, not something else from the tears. In the Latin example, it is really circum virum, "around the man", that is meant, so the ambiguity of the construction is genuine. (Only the unidiomatic use of dare may hint that something is amiss with the interpretation of circum as a plain preposition.)

The background is, of course, that in Proto-Indo-European and Early Indo-European dialects, including Hittite, the construction was NOUNObj + ADVERB + VERB, where the adverb could be interpreted as either belonging closer to the noun (hence, a postposition) or the verb (hence, a preverb). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 04:06, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

English examples

 * "to boldly go"
 * "un-fucking-believable"

--ESP (talk) 05:34, 11 October 2015 (UTC)


 * The first of those, like most in this arti-crap-cle, is obviously not tmesis.


 * The second is. Correctrix (talk) 04:32, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

The second of those is also not tmesis. Infixation and tmesis are not the same thing. Kokoshneta (talk) 17:01, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

"Example" not actually from Ovid
"Tmesis is found as a poetic or rhetorical device in classical Latin poetry, such as Ovid's Metamorphoses. Words such as circumdare, to surround, are split apart with other words of the sentence in between, e.g. circum virum dant: "they surround the man"

This is phrased in a way that makes it sound as though circum virum dant comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. In fact, it doesn't - I have looked through the Metamorphoses in the original Latin today, and these words are not found within this text.

I know, the above phrasing in the article doesn't explicitly say that these words come from Ovid. But it makes it SOUND as though they're from Ovid. I thought they were from Ovid, until I checked and found that they're not. A quick Google search reveals that others have fallen into the same trap as me: this person,, for instance.

Can we replace this with an example that's actually attested in Latin? I can get on the case soon, but I haven't got time at the moment. LegesRomanorum (talk) 16:21, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

"Apron" and "uncle" the result of tmesis?
If anyone knows what "In that sense, words such as apron and uncle may be seen as the result of tmesis of napron and nuncle" means, could you explain it in the article? I don't see how those words relate to the passage about "a whole nother". 209.6.200.194 (talk) 22:30, 26 May 2020 (UTC)