APM
It shouldn’t be any different in other metropolises, but in Hong Kong, one of the major activities people have during the Christmas holiday is shopping in big, grand and sometimes grandiose shopping malls. Certainly these malls have been getting more or more thoughtfully designed and decorated, but at the same time, another trend seems to have emerged in recent years.
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After posting my other article So many negative prefixes, I received very positive feedback and many readers apparently found the article interesting and useful. Indeed, these little affixes (prefixes and suffixes) can be puzzling when they are similar in meaning but nevertheless non-interchangeable. That makes people ask why they are what they are: is there a subtle rule beneath all the messy superficial distribution, or things just happen by chance?
Not long ago, a friend asked me whether there are rules governing the usage of those suffixes of nationality, such as –ese, –ian and –ish. I thought about it for a while, then I remembered that years ago I read a post on the Internet, saying that –ese is a derogatory ending used only on those countries that the western world thought to be inferior, so we have adjectives like Chinese, Vietnamese and Burmese. After all, many of the Asian countries do form their adjectives in –ese. But I had doubts, don’t the westerners just love Japanese stuff? And why Korean, Indian, Malaysian and Indonesian then? So I decided to look for the answer myself.
In English, we can use a number of prefixes on adjectives to form their opposites. The following pairs come to mind as examples:
| typical | atypical |
| hydrous | anhydrous |
| social | antisocial |
| honest | dishonest |
| legal | illegal |
| possible | impossible |
| active | inactive |
| regular | irregular |
| existent | nonexistent |
| kind | unkind |
In most cases, these prefixes are not interchangeable, so we do not have *unlegal or *apossible, for instance. Of course, fluent speakers have no problem in using the right prefix for the right word, as more than often, the negative adjectives are learned word by word. But that should not stop us from pausing and asking, “Are these prefixes randomly matched with the words?” The lesson from Why is probible not possible and possable not probable? tells us that while not everything has a reason, most things indeed do not come from nothing. So the question that we should really ask is “What are the differences between these prefixes?”
The last few weeks I was totally absorbed by the Olympic Games, which accounted for the absence of new posts on this blog. Now I would like to go back to a topic we discussed earlier. In A natural centrifuge in English, we took a look at the general tendency in English to delay a heavy element until the end of the sentence. In the article, we looked at examples which apparently merely exchange the positions of two elements,
1. This house has a broken window.
2. This house has a window broken by a fallen tree nearby.
but the tendency is actually more profound than this.
Homographs are words which share the same spelling but are nevertheless different in meaning and possibly also in pronunciation. An example is the word ‘bank’, which can either refer to a financial establishment in which you can do a lot of things to your money, or an edge of a river. In this case, we say they are two different words which happen to share the same spelling and the same pronunciation.