Question about the "F-Bomb"

[BobK]

Originally Posted by Tdol

I read an article that described the internal vowel changes for plurals (men) and tense (sat) as infixes. How do we feel on that?

Hmm. Specifically English philolology is something I've picked up very informally, but I k now that in German the umlaut denotes the absence of an 'e'; and possibly* the vowel in "man" was changed by another one being infixed. I must do some reading.

b

* I'm not saying this happened, just that similar things happened in other languages.

[rewboss]

Originally Posted by Tdol

I read an article that described the internal vowel changes for plurals (men) and tense (sat) as infixes. How do we feel on that?

"Skeptical" is one word I use to describe my feelings here. It's merely an internal vowel change; nothing is actually infixed. The technical term for this kind of change is "ablaut".

An example of an infix (although technically not a very good one) is the German "ge" used to form the past participle.

Strictly speaking, it's actually a prefix; for example, the past participle of "spielen" ("to play") is "gespielt". However, if the verb has a separable prefix (such as "auseinandernehmen", "to take apart"), the "ge" prefix is inserted between the separable prefix and the stem (in this case "auseinandergenommen").

Strictly speaking, that's not an infix, because the bit that comes before is itself a prefix; but it looks a bit like an infix.

An example of a true infix (cited by Wikipedia) is from the Tagalog language, which has borrowed the English word "graduate". The Tagalog equivalent of the active voice is formed by infixing "-um-" in the first syllable: "grumaduate".

Infixes do occur in certain dialect forms of English. Hip-hop slang, for example, uses the infix "-iz-" or "-izn-", as in "hizouse" for "house".