"Ghost Verbs" (Philological Room) Language Learning Forum

"Ghost Verbs"
Tags: Verbs/Conjugation
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20 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

Iversen
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Message 17 of 20

10 January 2008 at 2:10pm | IP Logged

agimcomas wrote:

... Now, the "duce" in english "reduce, deduce" etc. seems to be just a verb ending form, a suffix, not a verb on its own.

It might be, but it isn't. The "-duce" goes back to the Latin verb "ducere" (to lead), and it is in every sense of the term a true verb, which just didn't make it into Modern English.

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epingchris
Triglot
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Message 18 of 20

13 January 2008 at 9:01am | IP Logged

I just came across this article in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranberry_morpheme

Really enlightening. In English this seems to be large in existence, since at one time it systematically borrowed from Latin words for more complicated ideas, but not for more common ideas. This gave rise to "-dict" in predict, "-spect" in respect, and "-fer" in refer.

It's interesting to note that in Chinese there are similar phenomena too. In character like "流", "硫", "毓", the right part (which indicates approximate pronunciation doesn't exist on its own. The same happens with "傷", "觴", "殤". Chances are, the right part used to be distinct word, but has since fallen out of use.
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vanityx3
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Message 19 of 20

17 January 2008 at 9:42pm | IP Logged

Raistlin Majere wrote:

Some languages have many compound verbs which are based on non-existing verbs.

For example, the compound verbs in Catalan "admetre", "permetre", "sotmetre", "cometre" all come from the same stem. By looking at their common conjugations (which I can post if you'd like so), one can see that they all came from a base verb metre*. But this verb does not exist in Catalan, it commes from Latin "mittere". This is what I call a "ghost verb", a verb that technically does not exist in a language but which has a full conjugation, with all verbal tenses and verbal persons.

Anybody knows other examples of verbs like these in other languages?

This is very interesting in that catalan doesn't have a verb metre. These verbs are very similar to the French admettre, permettre, soumettre, and commetre. But French does have the root verb, mettre, which is very close to what Catalan would have but doesn't.
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hagen
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Message 20 of 20

19 January 2008 at 4:30am | IP Logged

Iversen wrote:

agimcomas wrote:

... Now, the "duce" in english "reduce, deduce" etc. seems to be just a verb ending form, a suffix, not a verb on its own.

It might be, but it isn't. The "-duce" goes back to the Latin verb "ducere" (to lead), and it is in every sense of the term a true verb, which just didn't make it into Modern English.

And in its nominal form "duke" it even made it into English. :-)

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