Category talk:English nouns ending in "-ism"

RFM discussion: June 2011–May 2014

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Category:English nouns ending in "-ism"

I would merge this into Category:English words suffixed with -ism. They are essentially the same. Note the name of this category allows entries like prism too, as it simply requires that the last three letters be -ism, no matter if the word in question is suffixed with -ism or not. --Mglovesfun (talk) 17:43, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

• I agree. Obviously, the category is not intended to indiscriminately catch all words sharing a particular string of letters, and the collection is therefore better captured by a category that specifies that it is limited to words sharing a suffix. bd2412 T 17:59, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

I strongly disagree. I begin with the second of MG's sentences. Words ending in "ism" include words like Marxism, which is actually derived from marxisme. This is not an isolated instance. Obviously the morphological "derivation" is different from the historical one. We have not resolved how to present the morphological pseudoderivation when it is differs from the historical etymology. Some entries show language such as (for Marxism) "from French Marxisme, equivalent to Marx + -ism". Until this problem is resolved this one suffix and this one category stands as a beacon is an example and a reminder of the incompleteness of our default approach to showing even affix derivations. (Other problems arise due to no distinction among the different etymologies of the same affix as in -er, etc.) DCDuring TALK 00:55, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Should this category, then, include prism, jism, and schism, which are morphologically completely unrelated to words having any -ism suffix equivalent? Would this be any different from a Category:English nouns ending in "-ark" or Category:English nouns ending in "-est"? bd2412 T 03:13, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Not if I were the sole decider. I have cleaned up similar misattributions of endings as suffixes (My favorite was -arian, which included Tocharian among others). The flow of meaning from Greek and Latin the English took many routes and cognates of the English -ism suffix may have been added in any of several ancestor languages. I am not sure how many suffixes fit this pattern, but I doubt that it will turn out to be a negligible share of English affixes. DCDuring TALK 04:10, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure that there's a contradiction here; a word can be suffixed with -ism and be from French, no? --Mglovesfun (talk) 08:59, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

The fact that marxisme was borrowed as Marxism with no -e, shows that the morphology of the word was interpreted as consisting of Marx + -ism when it was borrowed. Therefore the word could arguably be considered a calque, not a borrowing. —CodeCat 15:09, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

@CodeCat: I don't disagree, but I would not want to extend the meaning of calque in this way because it is not understood by normal folk.

@MG: We seem to follow the fiction of single origin. So words that show evidence of having been borrowed whole from another language are not normally shown as having undergone "affixation". I suppose the normal process of a suffix becoming productive is that the suffix is abstracted from such "whole" borrowings and applied to first etymologically similar stems (eg, from the same language or language family), then to broader classes of stems in a more macaronic way. We could choose to ignore the historical pattern, but the "equivalent to" wording seems the best we can do. DCDuring TALK 15:28, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

If it's a 'fiction' why follow it at all? --Mglovesfun (talk) 08:54, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Because, as with most common fictions, not doing so would be too much for our little brains. Almost all (All?) of our conceptual schemes (eg, those underlying categorization) are fictions. If you'd care to, I'd be happy to discuss this on a user talk page. DCDuring TALK 14:03, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I support the merge, unless we allow categories like the arbitrary Category:English nouns ending in "-ark" bd mentions. - -sche (discuss) 23:14, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

• Coming awfully late to this discussion, I support the merge too. There's nothing wrong with saying "borrowed from French marxisme; synchronically analyzable as Marx + -ism", which will put the term both in Category:English terms derived from French and in Category:English words suffixed with -ism. I do this all the time for Irish words with suffixes that are inherited from Old Irish words with the same suffix, and in principle we could even do this for words like loved, which is historically directly from Old English lufode but at the same time is synchronically love + -ed. —Angr 09:55, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Merged and deleted. bd2412 T 03:37, 15 May 2014 (UTC)