Talk:Word stem

IE stems
I made a start with the definition and English examples (could add Spanish, some Japanese, but it's rather clear as it is). Someone with a clue should write about IE verb stems, which look like a completely different thing to me (agglutinative inflection rather than derivation). -- Pablo D. Flores 12:19, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Moved here from Pages needing attention/Linguistics. -- Beland (talk) 16:55, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

My revert of "ending = suffixed inflections"

 * Correction: I've put Ending up for deletion. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 03:50, 18 March 2006 (UTC)


 * In my defense, I realize now that there is a narrow sense and a broad sense of "suffix." Just as one could claim that a "lion" is distinct from a "cat" when using "cat" in a narrow sense, someone else could say that they're all "cats" and the distinction is between "great cats" and "domesticated cats." This is precisely what the Affix article does, noting that affixes "may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed." And yet, the article List of English suffixes, while listing "-ing" (which I would call an "ending"), includes neither "-s" nor "-ed," which would arguably be two of the very most common suffixes in the English language; I think this is because many people know intuitively that there is a big difference between an "ending" like "-s" and a suffix like "-ness."


 * I will yield if the community consensus is that any letters added to the end of a word qualify as a suffix, although I doubt that any list of Latin suffixes would include "-is" as a third declension genitive singular and "-amus" as first conjugation first person plural present. That is a HOE! article. But I am happy to see that most of what I have contributed in this article has remained. — Revjmyoung 14:38, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Hmmm... In fact List of English suffixes should include inflectional suffixes, unless a clarification is made somewhere. Either that, or rename it to List of English derivational suffixes. It's not that there are two senses of "suffix", or that the community consensus has anything to do. A suffix is a bound morpheme that is added to the end of a word, period. Whether it's inflectional or derivational is not part of the definition. "Ending" suggests derivation because that's how it's taught in schools. Inflectional endings tend to be grouped in paradigms (conjugation or declension tables) and set apart. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 16:44, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion of Splitting
This article has quite compared stem and root in the introduction. The content that related to root, should be split out into Root_(linguistics) or removed. However others in this article, should stay. Rock on She (talk) 17:14, 18 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't see a problem with it. The two concepts are very closely related, a comparison is appropriate, and if you moved the content to root, then someone could complain that since it mentions "stem" so much it should be split out into Word stem! Danielklein (talk) 03:40, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Closely related, yes, but this article conflates the two concepts on a seemingly random basis. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 08:24, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

"part of the word that is common to all inflected variants"
There are languages in which every part of the word can change due to inflection or suffixation, yet it is still sensible to speak of a stem. For example, the Northern Sami verb eallit, whose inflection can be seen on Wiktionary. Only a single l is constant throughout the inflection, everything else is subject to change. But the stem of this verb is definitely ealli-, which is given as an argument to the template. The template can figure out all the forms from this one stem.

So I think the definition in the article needs some revising. It's not necessarily the part of the word that doesn't change, but rather the part of the word from which all inflected forms can be inferred. Rua (mew) 13:16, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Structure of the word destabilize
I am afraid the example in "For another example, the root of the English verb form destabilized is stabil-, a form of stable that does not occur alone; the stem is de·stabil·ize, which includes the derivational affixes de- and -ize, but not the inflectional past tense suffix -(e)d." might be a bit unfortunate, since destabilize might actually more directly derive from Latin stabilis from stō+-bilis. If that is correct, stabil- is arguably not be a form of stable.Redav (talk) 14:00, 29 March 2020 (UTC)