NEO-CLASSICAL COMPOUNDS IN ENGLISH (PART 4)

NEO-CLASSICAL COMPOUNDS IN ENGLISH

If you have gone through my previous write-ups, you would know that affixes are bound morphemes. It implies that these constituents cannot stand alone. Nevertheless, you must remember that a bound morpheme may not be an affix. 

                          How can it be possible?                                                

It is because some of the bound morphemes in English are derived from Latin and Greek. In these classical languages, these units were used as root words. 

For example, 'micro-', 'tele-', '-scope' and '-graph'.

Examples of Neo-Classical Compounds:

1. Let's deal with 'micro-' first. Just have a look at the examples.

Micro-phone

Micro-scope

  

Micro-wave

2. 'Tele-': 

Tele-phone

Tele-communication

Tele-vision

3. '-graph':

Photo-graph

Sono-graph

Tele-graph

 4. '-scope':

Micro-scope

Tele-scope

I have deliberately used hyphens in these examples in order to highlight the bound morpheme. You might have noticed that 'graph' and 'scope' are also part of the examples. More importantly, they can also be used as separate words. This contradicts what I had said earlier. Well, the words, 'graph' and 'scope', do stand alone. But, they have different meanings when they are used separately. 

You might also have noticed something else. If we believe that all bound morphemes are affixes (which isn't the case), you have to assume that certain compounds, for example, 'microscope' and 'telegraph' are made of affixes. But it's not possible because we know that a word must have at least one stem. And, compound words are combinations of roots or lexemes. This is a peculiar feature of 
'micro-', 'tele-', '-scope', '-graph', etc. These bound morphemes make you feel that they are affixes. But, they are not. Remember that.

We call these roots Combining Forms because they can only exist in combination with other morphemes.

Anyhow, I hope you got to learn something new. You can click the follow button and do the rest in order to get notifications in your inbox.

Until next time, this is RB, signing off.

© RB