Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Greek morphemes used in English


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. SpinningSpark 21:56, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

List of Greek morphemes used in English

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Belongs to wiktionary as a category therein. There are thousands of Greek morphemes in English; the page in unmaintainable and utterly pointless Staszek Lem (talk) 23:36, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 00:35, 13 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Comment Can be maintained. Surely Greek morphemes in English is not growing any more? Not pointless. I found it interesting. Aoziwe (talk) 12:48, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Yu'll be surprised, but it is growing. Staszek Lem (talk) 20:12, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Words are growing, yes, but not the morpemes used? (One of the beauties of English, one can grow the language without just making lexical stuff up.) Aoziwe (talk) 12:03, 21 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Weak delete Yes it does not add anything one should be able to find in a dictionary, so delete provided it does appear as a category in Wiktionary.  Weak because if it can be made encyclopedic, and I would like to see such, for example a discourse on when these terms first appeared, by whom, where, what in, and at what levels in society, etc. Aoziwe (talk) 12:48, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
 * See English words of Greek origin for general discourse. And if there is detailed enough info about what when where and why, we can have separate articles even about separate words. Otherwise it's just dicdefs. Staszek Lem (talk) 20:12, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete - not dictionary. D4iNa4 (talk) 16:38, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 15:45, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Relisting comment: Backed out my close, so getting this back where people can find it -- RoySmith (talk) 22:28, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete - WP:NOTDICTIONARY, WP:NOTDIRECTORY. Can probably be handled by Wiktionary categories. The list is potentially unmanageably large and arguably open-ended, despite being relatively small at the moment. LjL (talk) 16:33, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep. I had previously closed this as delete, which I think was a defensible close given the above debate.  But, after this conversation, I've come to the conclusion that my close was incorrect.  I wrote on my talk page, there's really not much I can do here, but that's a cop-out.   I don't know what policy to cite to support my position, so maybe WP:IAR will have to do.  As I've said before, there's too much crap in Wikipedia.  The classic examples I bring up are porn stars, third-rate football players, pokemon, and endless drivel about popular culture.  It may be properly sourced, and policy-compliant, but that doesn't stop it from being crap.  Here we have an article about the historical foundations of the English language.  If that's not an encyclopedic subject, then I don't know what is.  We should have an article about it.  Sure, the list may be so big as to be unmaintainable, but then again, so are the lists of porn stars and pokemon characters.  WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, fine.  But, at least if we're going to have all the crap, let's also have some worthwhile articles about worthwhile topics.  Anyway, I've backed out my close, un-deleted the article, and said my peace.  Maybe I've been playing wiki-janitor for too long.  -- RoySmith (talk) 22:25, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep. This is a valuable reference tool to WP. -- Odysses  (☏) 20:04, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, -- RoySmith (talk) 22:28, 20 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Comment: there is a guideline about stand-alone lists for a reason. Just "ignoring all rules" about a list that cannot really work in the current fashion (but, as mentioned, could be done better on Wiktionary in various smarter ways) won't fix your Pokémon articles. Would you support an indiscriminate "List of English words"? Heck, why not a "List of words"? Well, wait, that exists, but redirects to various topic-specific lists of English words; those, in general, are not as WP:INDISCRIMINATE as this one risks being (though it's quite possible some should be looked at). LjL (talk) 23:47, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment Still as above.  Make it more encyclopedic.  (I do not like plain lists.)   Make it a companion article for English words of Greek origin. Aoziwe (talk) 12:03, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Rethink Split List of Greek and Latin roots in English into Latin and Greek and merge Greek morphemes with Greek roots. The morphemes article is largely a duplicate of the roots article, but the morphemes article does have actual example words and their meanings. I would still like to provenance too for each use, ie, when these terms first appeared, by whom, where, what in, and at what levels in society, etc. Aoziwe (talk) 12:13, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, that seems like an example of another article that's already gotten way too long and unwieldy. I really wonder why we have Wiktionary in the first place if this sort of detailed word lists, etymologies and examples are supposed to be kept on Wikipedia instead. LjL (talk) 15:40, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
 * An appeal to WP:OTHERWIKISEXIST? :-) In one sense, wikipedia is a victim of its own success.  I suspect the number of people who know about wikipedia outstrips the number who know about wictionary by several orders of magnitude.  Which means (and I'm only being partially facetious) that wictionary is where information goes to die.  But, let's look past that for the moment, and assume moving this information to wictionary is the right thing.  In that case, what we would want to do is first get the information moved there, and only after that happens, delete the current article.  That would at least ensure that the information was preserved.  But, deleting the current article before the information has been preserved, just loses it completely.  -- RoySmith (talk) 19:51, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Merge - Presuming we keep list of Greek and Latin roots in English, what argument might there be not to merge this into that article (regardless of whether that list is split)? Specifically, my question is linguistic -- is there a reason they would be incompatible? &mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  \\ 21:21, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, &mdash; Coffee //  have a cup  //  beans  // 03:26, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Keep per the significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources. <li> The book notes: "Most of the loans from Greek that have made their way into English are relatively recent (i.e. post-15th century) learnedisms and technical vocabulary that have generally been coined outside of Greek but draw on Greek morphemes. For instance, many of the so-called inkhorn terms that stirred up usage-related controversy among scholars and language commentators in the 16th and 17th centuries, e.g. Thomas Wilson, who wrote against their use in his 1560 work The Arte of Rhetorique, were classically inspired coinages, e.g. anacephalize 'to recapitulate' (from Ancient Greek [AGrk] ana-'again' + kephal- 'head', thus a Hellenized version of re-capit-ulate, from Latin re- and caput- 'head'). And, in the technical arena, one can cite the word telephone, dating from the first half of the 19th century for various signaling devices (e.g. one that used musical notes), and only later coming to be applied to the electricity-based device invented later in the century, and actually composed in French out of the Greek-derived elements tele- (AGrk tēle- 'far') and phone (AGrk phōnē 'voice, sound'), thus 'sound from afar'. Note also medical terminology, such as cardiomyopathy (AGrk kardia 'heart' + my- 'muscle' + path- 'suffer'), otorhinolaryngologist (AGrk ōt- 'ear' + rhin- 'nose' + laryng- 'larynx, upper part of windpipe' + logo- 'reckoning, discussion' + -ist- 'one-who VERBS' [agentive suffix]), or electroencephalography (AGrk ēlektro- 'electrum (silver-gold alloy)' + enkephalo- 'brain' (from en- 'in' + kephal- 'head', thus the 'brain' as '(that which is) inside the head'). See also below for other technical vocabulary from the Greek."</li> <li> The book notes: "English has borrowed and continues to borrow affixes from other languages – primarily Latin and Greek – to create words via derivational affixation: [Table 2.1 is displayed] Latin: [two Latin suffixes]  Greek:  -archy: anarchy, monarchy, matriarchy  -gram: telegram, anagram, cardiogram  -graph: telegraph, phonograph, radiograph  -logue/log: catalog, travelogue, analog,  -oid: trapezoid, humanoid, Freakazoid  -phile/phobe: audiophile, homophobe, arachnophobe  And some words are hybrids, or English words derived using Latin and Greek morphemes, such as television (from Greek telos 'far' and Latin visio 'vision') and mammography (from Latin mamma 'breast' and Greek graphia 'writing')."</li> <li> The book notes: "Numeral Morphemes; Distinguishing between Latin and Greek Morphemes The numeral morphemes of Latin and Greek are among the commonest found in English words. Most of them are already familiar to you. Their use often illustrates the tendency to combine Latin morphemes with other Latin morphemes and Greek morphemes with other Greek morphemes. For example, with the root gon 'angle' which comes from Greek, we can use the Greek numeral morpheme penta 'five' in pentagon 'a five-sided geometrical figure'. But with the root later 'side', which comes from Latin, we use the Latin numeral morpheme quadr 'four' in quadrilateral 'a four-sided geometrical figure'. Morphemes often occur with others from the same source language simply because the entire word was borrowed from that language. The word pentagon, for example, originated in Greek; it wasn't first coined in English from Greek roots. Words that are coined anew in English frequently violate the tendency for a word's morphemes to be monolingual in origin. The word monolingual itself is a violation, as it is composed of mon 'one' (G) and lingu 'tongue' (L). Other examples of this kind of mixing are neonate (G, L), amoral (G, L), dysfunction (G, L) and posthypnotic (L, G). These violations are perfectly valid words, but it is useful to be aware of the strong tendency for words with roots from a given language to contain other morphemes from that language. There are some signs that tell you when a prefix or root morph is Greek rather than Latin. The best clues are the presence in one of the roots of one or more of the following:"</li> <li> The book notes: "Admittedly, Modern English has an important number of affixes, most of them derivational. Speakers of Romance languages are often surprised by the large proportion of English affixes which are basically the same as those in the inventory of their own languages. Such affixes perform similar functions as in other European languages and are frequently seen in the same complex words. The reason is that English acquired these Latinate and Greek morphemes through contact with Fren and Latin (see Fuster 1995). The sample in (10) bears witness to the importance of these imports: (10) Prefixes: a- as in amoral, atheist sub- as in subdivision, sub-total  co- as in co-author, co-pilot  Suffixes:  -able as in acceptable, adorable  -ance as in ignorance, brilliance  -cy as in frequency, bureaucracy" These identities also prove that a large section of the vocabulary—and morphemic inventory of English—may be acquired without great effort by speakers of Romance languages. A particular consequence in English is that they have introduced synonymic patterns in their morphemic system, where Romance affixes coexist with various other native affixes: for example, dis-, in-, non- and un- basically have the same meaning as "not". </li> <li> The book notes: "The process by which these Chinese-based neologisms have been made up in Japan from Chinese lexical materials is almost exactly parallel to the way in which English has provided itself with most of its modern scientific, technical, and medical vocabulary by coining neologisms on the basis of Latin and Greek. Just as the Greek morphemes meaning 'eye' and 'a watcher' have been combined to form the English neologism ophthalmoscope, so also have countless new words been coined in Japan by combining Chinese morphemes, particularly since the late nineteenth century and especially in science, technology, and medicine, where the inherited vocabuulary of the language, whether native Japanese of borrowed Chinese, was naturally inadequate to the requirements of industrialization and modernization."</li> <li> The Google Books snippet view notes: "Many English morphemes originated in other languages. Hippopotamus, for example, combines the Greek morpheme hippos, meaning 'horse,' with the Greek morpheme potamos, meaning 'river.' The hippopotamus is, literally, a 'river horse."</li> </ol>There is sufficient coverage in reliable sources to allow the subject to pass Notability, which requires "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". Cunard (talk) 07:29, 28 February 2016 (UTC) </li></ul>
 * The subject also passes Notability, which says, "One accepted reason why a list topic is considered notable is if it has been discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources, per the above guidelines; notable list topics are appropriate for a stand-alone list." The subject also passes Stand-alone lists: "Glossaries – alphabetical, topical lists of terms, rather than of notable entities – are encyclopedic when the entries they provide are primarily informative explorations of the listed terminology, pertaining to a notable topic that already has its own main article on Wikipedia." For example, the Greek morphemes hippopotamus, neonate, amoral, dysfunction, pentagon, television, mammography, and ophthalmoscope (which are discussed in the sources I provided) all are notable topics. Cunard (talk) 07:29, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I have no objection to Rhododendrites's suggestion to merge this article to List of Greek and Latin roots in English, but I recommend that the editorial decision to merge or not merge be made outside of AfD. Subject-matter experts may have reasons to keep the two articles separate or to merge them. Pinging, who contested the earlier close. What are your thoughts about a merge? Cunard (talk) 07:29, 28 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Merge to List of Greek and Latin roots in English as suggested above. That list is already more comprehensive and the wikilinks in this one are a mess (e.g. the link for miso). --Reinoutr (talk) 21:27, 7 March 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.