My mind sometimes goes off on tangents and usually at the most inopportune times.
A few nights ago, my daughter asked me if “imperfect” was spelled with an “im-” or “in-”. I informed her correctly, and the rest of the evening went on without incident. About 6 hours later, around 3:30 am, I couldn’t sleep and started a mental journey of the spelling of various negative prefix forms in the English language. I started with “imperfect” which means, generally, not perfect, or lacking perfection, flawed. Then I thought of similarly prefixed negative versions of other words, like “implausible”, “impossible”, and “impure”. As 3:30 became 3:40, I was trending towards prefixes with “in-”, like “incomprehensible”, “inconclusive”, “incomparable”, and “inconvenient.” Of course, I couldn’t stop there. My mind wouldn't allow it. “Ir-” prefixes also fit the bill, with examples like “irresponsible”, “irrespective”, “irrational”, and “irreversible”. So, this got me thinking even more, all the while my clock continued to click past 3:50 am: 'Why does the negative form of the root duplicate the first letter?' ‘Perhaps,’ I thought, ‘it has something to do with pronunciation’. This was very convincing in my head and sounded like a well-considered point that deserved a deeper look. Recently, I had read the short, well-written book about the development of the English language, “How English Became English: A Short History of a Global Language” by Simon Horobin. I became keenly aware that the English language developed in parallel forms: written and oral forms. This could explain why many words in the English language are not spelled like they sound. For example “through” is pronounced as ‘thru’ as opposed to ‘thruff’ or 'thrug'. Further in my madness, I delved into my dalliances with other languages I had failed to learn. I recalled that in Japanese, specifically, some prefixes force the root work to change their first letter because it would otherwise create the equivalent of a car crash in the human mouth. For instance, root words that start with a soft consonant like "f-" sometimes change to “b-” because the prefix ends with a "-n" ('han' + 'fun' = ‘hanbun’). The clock was approaching 4:00 am at this point: I'm on a roll so there's no stopping my brain. Putting 2 and 2 together, I solved for “x” and determined that words with the Latin prefix “in-” had developed in parallel form where the pronunciation altered its spelling over time. So, surely, “inpossible” was the original word, but pronunciation proved inconvenient. One must conclude that the spoken version became more popular and forced the spelling to change. It all made sense. I'm genius. So, at about 4:10 am, my brain finally allowed me to resume my pathetic attempt to sleep, all the while silently wondering if I was off my rocker. My ultimate conclusion, before I finally drifted off to sleep: The rules of the English language are “imperfect”, in practice “inconvenient”, creating a language that is "irrational". Did I mention I never studied etymology? Tune in next time for another episode of "How Ravi's Mind Works". Be Excellent to Each Other.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorOn this page I feature personal thoughts and perspectives on a myriad number of things. Archives
October 2022
Categories
|
Web Hosting by Bluehost