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Effectivity vs Efficiency | ||
Tags: Meaning of words | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5060 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 17 of 17 01 February 2015 at 9:57am | IP Logged |
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There are many words for which -ivity and -iveness derivations both exist, both are reasonably widely used, and
mean about the same thing (passiveness/passivity, perceptiveness/perceptivity). Dictionaries will often simply present both forms as synonymous variants. Sometimes they both exist and mean something very different (nativeness/nativity). The interesting case is when, for whatever unpredictable reason, a word takes one of -ivity and -iveness, but usually not the other. In most of these cases, a quick search of the Internet shows that the disfavored form is still used a little bit. Sometimes it shows up in published technical papers, sometimes in published books, and almost always in unpublished text by Internet users. I was able to find examples in published materials of "restivity" instead of the usual "restiveness", "decisivity" instead of the usual "decisiveness," and "captiveness" instead of the usual "captivity." It is reasonable to argue prescriptively that, when one synonymous form is used more than the other, it is better to use the popular one. But there's no clear boundary as to when the disfavored form does or doesn't count as a "real" word. A descriptive and extremely thorough lexicographer would document all forms that are attested at all. Edited by robarb on 01 February 2015 at 9:59am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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