Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 March 16

= March 16 =

Trivial exercise: educational aid, "root words"
In attempting to show a child how words are made of Greek and Latin etc, I drew a little two-axis graph. Going this way it says "homophone, homonym, homogenized, homo sapiens" and that way it says "homophone, telephone, phonics, phonograph." Somethin like that. Explained it to her. She didn't get it, though. I got to thinking, it might help if I had a small grid of words in a kind of "magic square." That is, where each row and column is a root/stem and every box contains a legitimate word. "Telephone | telegraph | homophone | homograph" would be the smallest possible example of such a group. Is there such a thing? How big could it get? Temerarius (talk) 16:02, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Interesting idea, but the "homo" in homo sapiens is Latin, meaning "man" (or "person"), whereas in the other words it's from Greek, meaning "the same". — Preceding unsigned comment added by AndrewWTaylor (talk • contribs) 17:05, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Note that homo as in Homo sapiens and the prefix homo- are etymologically entirely unrelated. The first is Latin and is cognate with the English noun groom in the sense of "future husband", which used to be goom. The second comes from Greek and is cognate with the English adjective same. --Lambiam 17:36, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Shit, I know that. I didn't write that down on the thing, I was just free-association typing. Temerarius (talk) 19:36, 16 March 2023 (UTC)


 * If you go by the basic meaning of the Greek roots, homophobia would mean "fear of those who are the same as oneself"... AnonMoos (talk) 20:35, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
 * "Homophobia" originally meant "fear of humans". The term was co-opted in the late 1960s. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:45, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Well, I can relate... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:18, 17 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Baseball_Bugs -- If the word has never meant "fear of sames", then it's always had a bogus form-meaning relationship according to the rules of the Classical languages (Greek and Latin). For the word to mean "fear of humans", it should probably be "hominophobia", or perhaps "homiphobia" (by analogy with "homicide") -- though these words mix Latin and Greek stems in a way that some classicists dislike (however, the word "television" does the same).  "Homophobia" smooshes the vowel of the nominative singular of the Latin word "homo" (whose oblique and plural stem is "homin-") together with the Greek "-o-" vowel between compound elements in a way which is not really allowed by Classical language compounding rules... AnonMoos (talk) 02:10, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Those who coin words often don't seem to care about rules. As to the current use of "homophobia", it's really short for "homosexualphobia", but that's apparently too many syllables. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:03, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Since the point is to coin new English words, why should they care about the rules of Latin or Greek? It's like playing with legos, I don't care what set the piece comes from I just care how I can use it to make something else.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 18:36, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Bingo. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:56, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Khajidha -- Classical correctness is not strictly required, and minor anomalies can often be overlooked ("Psychoanalysis" was an early prominent word which was coined with a Classical compounding anomaly), but asking advice from those who know something about the subject can prevent botches like "amatonormativity"... AnonMoos (talk) 00:06, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * That assumes that there is something wrong with that word.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 01:29, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Khajidha -- There's something wrong with it if you think that a word formed from Latin elements should have some basic Latin-language plausibility, and not be a random concatenation. Amatonormativity is on a level with "Illegitimi non carborundum" as a pretentious pseudo-Latin garbling, but "Illegitimi non carborundum" is a joke, while "amatonormativity" is intended to be a serious word... AnonMoos (talk) 23:32, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
 * "There's something wrong with it if you think that a word formed from Latin elements should have some basic Latin-language plausibility, and not be a random concatenation. " That's my entire point. We're not making Latin words, we're making English ones, so "Latin-language plausibility" is quite irrelevant. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 06:11, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Why bother to invoke Latin at all if you can't even be bothered to make even a nominal effort to get it right? Someone who wants the prestige of Latin when coining a word, but doesn't put in any work (or even ask anyone for help) to ensure minimal correctness, is kind of a hypocrite.  I guess the "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well" ethic is somewhat outdated nowadays... AnonMoos (talk) 21:55, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I see no more reason to follow Latin rules when making English words than I do for maitaining case endings and cojugations on words borrowed from Latin. Or for limiting the uses of individual letters to just those ways the Romns used. And I am sure that the ancient Romans were just as unconcerned with the rules of the languages that they took words from. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 19:52, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
 * If you don't know anything and don't care at all about even an approximation to Latinate correctness, then just use fricken English -- "Love-normativity", or whatever -- because someone who wants the prestige of Latin without putting in any of the work involved with Latin (or even being able to ask those more knowledgeable for help) is revealing their unpleasant personality characteristics to the world. And I have no idea what you're talking about with that last point, since some types of Latin had elaborate Greek-like inflectional paradigms for nouns borrowed from Greek -- we even have an article on it, see Declension of Greek nouns in Latin.  And of course the compounding rules for Latin and Greek were rather similar, so that wasn't an issue (though Latin lacked the Greek -o- vowel connecting stems in a compound)... AnonMoos (talk) 23:13, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Television. Bazza (talk) 20:09, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I already mentioned that above. AnonMoos (talk) 23:13, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
 * The OED does have an entry for "homophobia" defined as "fear or hatred of men or the male sex". It is tagged as "rare" and there are three citations, from 1901 to 1960. It does note that the etymology is "irregular". The first citation for the now-common meaning "hostility towards homosexuals" is from 1969. CodeTalker (talk) 00:28, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Homophobia instead of *homiphobia is a case of vowel harmony, generally rare in IE languages but occasionally manifested in neologisms, as "the emergence of the unmarked" postulates. 82.166.199.42 (talk) 07:55, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
 * 82.166.199.42 -- Smooshing together the final-vowel of the nominative singular form (not generally used in compounding) and the Greek stem-connecting vowel seems a lot more plausible... AnonMoos (talk) 00:06, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * The regular formation of a learned neologism for fear of humans yields anthropophobia, attested as early as 1880. If the Ancient Greeks had needed a word for this, however, they would have used (phobanthrōpía); compare English phobanthropy.  --Lambiam 12:53, 17 March 2023 (UTC)