Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 May 24

= May 24 =

Preposition + verb compounds in Germanic languages?
I’ve been thinking about the fact that in many Indo-Europen languages I have some passing familiarity with, there is a pattern of building variants of verbs by prefixing them with prepositions, e.g., in Spanish, we have built from tener, contener, detener, etc. (and given that this sort of thing also exists in Latin, I’m assuming it’s in other Romance languages). Greek has oodles like ἄγω yielding ἐπάγω, περιάγω, etc. Czech (which I’m assuming is representative of Slavic languages) has, e.g., jet yielding odjet, projet, přejet, etc.

But in English, the only similar words I can come up with are borrowings from Romance languages (e.g., contain, detain, retain) but no real parallels. Is this the case with Germanic languages in general or is English an outlier in Indo-European languages. (I’m also curious if this sort of thing is common in Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi and other languages more in the Indo- part of the Indo-European family tree).

D A Hosek (talk) 04:19, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I think there are a number of verbs in English formed in this way from Germanic roots, such as bypass, downgrade, offload, off-put, offset, outbid, outbreak, outburst, outcast, outdraw, overbear, overcome, overeat, undercut, underlay, upbraid, upheave, uphold, withdraw, withhold, and withstand, to name a few. CodeTalker (talk) 05:11, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Also a non-productive cluster of for– verbs. —Tamfang (talk) 01:22, 28 May 2022 (UTC)
 * In other Germanic languages, I think the cognate prefixes to for- are still quite productive, and would generally serve an augmentative function. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:53, 28 May 2022 (UTC)


 * In German and Dutch, forming verbs by prefixing prepositions is a big thing. For example, German übersetzen ("to translate") from über ("over") + setzen ("to set"). The prefix can be separable or inseparable, or for some verbs (including übersetzen) either, with a difference in meaning – splittable übersetzen has the more literal meaning of "to move across". The splittable ones are much like English phrasal verbs such as carry over, but as far as I could figure out even Old English had no splittable verbs. --Lambiam 07:20, 24 May 2022 (UTC)


 * The phenomenon of separating the prefix from the word is called Tmesis. It also occurs in Homeric Greek, Latin, Old Irish and Vedic Sanskrit. So perhaps it goes back to Proto-Indo-European. Av &#61; λv (talk) 07:37, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * In German, the "tmesis" is only possible for finite verb forms, and if possible, it is obligatory. The possible cases are: finite verb in the second position of a clause (SVO, adverbial+VSO, or OVS), or in a closed question (VSO). This is remarkable similar to the ordering of certain adverbials in relation to the verb:
 * Ich mache es rot, weil ich es rot machen will. (I make it red because I want to make it red.)
 * Ich mache es tot, weil ich es &thinsp;totmachen&thinsp; will. (I kill it because I want to kill it.)
 * It therefore seems a reasonable hypothesis to me that, instead of a tmetic process, we see the reverse: a (purely orthographic) rule, informed by idiomaticity, of writing the adverbial and the naked verb of certain two-part verbs together when they happen to meet each other without intervening words. The German orthography could have been to use a two-word phrasal verb tot machen instead of the prescribed totmachen. --Lambiam 19:35, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Modern English has lots of "Phrasal verbs" in which an adverb derived from a preposition occurs after the verb, with somewhat unpredictable meaning ("give up", "give in", "break out" etc), and also a smaller number of verbs with prepositional prefixes ("understand" etc). In modern English, these verb classes are distinct, but they both originated from an earlier situation somewhat like modern German, where a prefix can be separated from some verbs and appear in a separate location in the sentence, in certain cases.  In late proto-Indo-European, most of the "prepositions" were probably mainly adverbs.  Modern Hindi has lots of loanwords from Sanskrit, but it has postpositions rather than prepositions, and in the modern vocabulary it uses serial verbs and compound verbs, rather than the prepositional prefixes of the older Indo-European languages... AnonMoos (talk) 08:04, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm reminded of the putative Winston Churchill quote (and let's face it, they're all putative at this point), regarding the supposed grammatical prohibition of the use of prepositions at the end of sentences, "This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put". -- Jayron 32 12:29, 25 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Yes, there are plenty of prefix verbs in Sanskrit. – I'm more curious about analogous constructions outside IE! —Tamfang (talk) 01:23, 28 May 2022 (UTC)


 * The original questioner asked about Hindi, so I gave him some information about Hindi. AnonMoos (talk) 02:37, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

Getaway chin
The table in Molidae was created several years ago by an Indian IP. Is "getaway chin" an idiomatic phrase? I'd like to change it to something more universally understood, but I'd need to understand it myself first. Card Zero (talk) 16:00, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Our article Mola alexandrini says that it has a bump on the head and a bump on the chin, so I think that replacing "Bump on head and getaway chin" with "Bumps on head and chin" would make the table clearer. Deor (talk) 17:05, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Fair enough. What a mysterious choice of word, though. I suppose the chin complete with bump looks a bit like one kind of apophyge, and escape lists that as the 11th meaning, and ... yeah, no. Oh, could it have meant cutaway? Card Zero  (talk) 17:17, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I would interpret "cutaway chin" as an indentation where the chin is supposed to be, the opposite of a chin bump. --Lambiam 08:42, 25 May 2022 (UTC)