Technical Difficulties

I had some issues with blog posts over the past week. I wrote one that ended up in the wrong place on the website, and then wrote another that self-deleted when I tried to move the first. I’m pretty tech savvy, but it’s not my natural habitat, so I’m confident that it was my fault and not some technical glitch. I’m still not sure what I did. Usually I draft in a word processor and then transfer the document to the blog, but this past week I didn’t, and it cost me. So if you saw a blog post appear and then disappear, it wasn’t me playing games; it was me trying to move something and losing it altogether. Too bad, because it was a quality post.

To repeat the cliché, Technology is great when it works.

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Sometimes, the trouble we encounter in word analysis is technical. My LEXinars often delve into seemingly esoteric technical points. It’s not because I’m a pedant; it’s because if you want to have a coherent, working system, you need to deal with technical difficulties. That’s true whether you’re operating a roller coaster or a writing system.

A couple weeks ago, I received this inquiry from an earnest and intelligent teacher who’s somehow wrangled her district into paying for her to take *all* of my LEXinars. She’s been studying with me for about a year, and is developing a beautifully consistent and clear understanding.

Gina, she writes. I’m working on a series of matrices to help me work better with my kids. I’m look at <habe/hibe> right now. I came across the word “habitat.” It appears to be a technical term that literally means “it inhabits.” So that would make it part of the word family, but how would you put that in a matrix? Would it go in the circle outside of the box? Have its own box? Something else entirely?

Because I didn’t see this email when it came in nearly a month ago, this teacher nudged me at the end of a LEXinar today. She reframed her question orally, and I said, “I can help you.” It’s not the case that I can help her because I’m morally superior to others; I can help her because I understand grammar and because I’ve studied this very word before. So I found the buried email and offered a response:

“This is a great question!

For starters, I want you to differentiate between inflectional and derivational suffixes. [We had just discussed this in class, so I knew she’d understand, which is not necessarily the case for most teachers.]

Inflectional categories in English are as follows (noun, verb, adjective):
1. plural
2. possessive
3. singular 3rd person present tense
4. past tense
5. present participle
6. past participle
7. comparative
8. superlative

Now I want you to differentiate between productive and non-productive suffixes. All inflectional suffixes are productive. If we get a new noun or a new verb or a new adjective in our lexicon, we will still inflect it the same way: (There were three cyborgs; He googled the answer; That is the phattest blunt evah…)

SOME derivational suffixes are productive, like <-ish>:  My voice sounds so cyborgish on that tape. Or <-able>: The answer to that question is googlable.

SOME derivational suffixes are non-productive, like <-ule> or <-ion>. You can’t just add <-ion> to google and get a noun: *googlion. You can’t just add a <-ule> (node~nodule) to cyborg and get a diminutive: *cyborgule.  No matter how much we might wish we could.

Now, some of our derivational suffixes in English were actually inflectional in Latin. For example, the common, non-productive derivational suffixes <-ent> and <-ant> were actually present participle suffixes in Latin (and/or French). This is exactly what you have with habitat — in LATIN, the marks a 3rd person, present tense verb, like the <-s> inflection in English inhabits. You can’t analyze it as a Latin inflection, because the word habitat in English is a noun, not a verb, and anyhow, it’s ENGLISH, not Latin.

However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t analyze it, just because it’s in a Latin loanword and has a Latin inflection on the end. We still analyze pleasant as having an <-ant> suffix even though it’s not participial in English like it is in French. In order for us to analyze the <-at> from habitat, it suffices to find another word that has the SAME suffix in it. And here it is (drumroll, please):

< magn + i + fic + at >

The present-day English (proper) noun Magnificat is a Christian (largely Catholic) canticle that is derived from the 3rd person, singular, present-tense Latin verb, magnificat, meaning ‘it magnifies.’ It refers to the Blessed Mary singing ‘My soul magnifies the Lord…’

So you have evidence to show that LATIN 3rd person singular present-tense INFLECTION is functioning as a NON-PRODUCTIVE nominal derivation in ENGLISH words of Latin origin. Both habitat and magnificat bear this pattern. [After sending this I also found requiescat, a funereal prayer (thus, a noun) derived from the 3rd person present-tense verb, roughly translated as ‘may s/he rest…’]

There is also a DIFFERENT non-productive Latinate <-at> suffix in the words format and concordat, which derives from the same Latin stem suffix that gives us <-ate>. In the case of these two words, that stem suffix was used in the Latin past participles formatus and concordatum. We have this same <-at> suffix in words like hemostat or thermostat.

In sum, you totally can analyze the <-at> in habitat, but you don’t have to.

I hope this rehabilitates your understanding and makes you better able to work with this family with your kiddos.”

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It’s a joy to see a teacher even willing to grapple with this level of technical difficulty in the writing system. I knew I could help her — and you — understand what’s up with this word. But in order to do so, it’s not sufficient to just understand spelling; you have to get a REAL grip on grammar too. No fakey-cutesy “Great” parts of speech or lie-binders or silly circle diagrams that don’t make sense. Rather, teachers AND kids need and deserve a real, scientific, elegant understanding of how grammar works.

Recently, I asked a friend and colleague why anyone in our “scholarly community” would accept the repackaged dreck of cruddy old grammar pedagogies as a good thing simply because they have warm feels for the person who produced it. It drives me nuts when someone who studies spelling a little starts offering shoddy classes and hawking erroneous materials as though they are experts, and everyone just lines up and praises the effort because, hey, we’re a community and we have to always be nice and complimentary or else someone might not like us because that’s what (mostly) women worry about.

“Why should I call this my ‘scholarly community’ when being a member of it requires me to check my critical understanding of grammar at the door?” I asked. “Why am I supposed to show scholarly respect toward someone who tries to pass off any and few as demonstrative pronouns [sic]?” I lamented. “Why do people who consider themselves my friends and colleagues expect me to politely smile and nod when I see grammar garbage passed off as expertise?”

“Because they don’t recognize it as garbage unless they’ve studied grammar with you,” she responded. “People don’t understand grammar so when they see that garbage they don’t know it’s garbage.” Ohhhhh, right. She helped me see that just because our broader spelling community understands spelling doesn’t mean that grammar has a good foothold. It doesn’t. People don’t recognize grammar dreck as grammar dreck because they don’t know how grammar works. But, as evidenced in the habitat example, understanding grammar — real, Grown-Up Grammar and not some flaccid 5th-grade facsimile — is a required part of understanding technical difficulties in the writing system. Again, you don’t have to analyze habitat, but technically you can if you know how.

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The teachers who take my classes do not do so out of an abundance of free time. They don’t take my classes because they don’t work or aren’t busy. It’s not the case that there’s a body of scholars who understand this but just choose to “do it” differently. There’s no book I can recommend where you can read up on everything I understand. There is my blog and there is my webstore. People often ask me “where’d you learn this?” or “where can I find that?” as though there is some Secret Compendium for Real-Life Linguists where I go look things up that I then bestow on an intellectually hungry audience of non-linguists.

It’s not like that.

The understanding I offer is my life’s work. I can’t inject it into someone else or refer someone to a Book Where They Can Look It All Up. I can’t make some craptastic video about *irregular verbs [sic] or some putrid *layers of language [sic] graphic smell like a rose. Please. If you want to understand what I’m offering, you have to study with me. You won’t find it in someone else’s materials or someone else’s classes or someone else’s brains. I’m not saying I invented the understanding — it’s all out there, so if you also want to spend 35 years studying language, maybe you’ll arrive here at the end of it. Or you could study with me (unless you’ve overstepped your boundaries with me, in which case, technically,  you can’t).

I’m about to start my 3rd round of Grammar for Grown-Ups at the end of this month. It’s so lovely to see this understanding start to blossom. People in my community now talk about form and function, participles, auxiliary verbs, and constituency, in ways that make sense. Someone emailed me this morning to ask if there’s still room. Yes. There’s still room. You can still sign up. We will be meeting 1-2 Friday evenings per month, from 6-8pm Central US time, starting September 28th.

So come get technical: no grammar facsimiles, no fake answers, no false understandings. Just word nerds in our natural habitat.

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