Back-formation

In etymology, back-formation is the process of creating a new lexeme, usually by removing actual or supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation, a term coined by James Murray in 1889. (OED online first definition of 'back formation' is from the definition of to burgle, which was first published in 1889.)

Back-formation is different from clipping – back-formation may change the part of speech or the word's meaning, whereas clipping creates shortened words from longer words, but does not change the part of speech or the meaning of the word.

For example, the noun resurrection was borrowed from Latin, and the verb resurrect was then backformed hundreds of years later from it by removing the ion suffix. This segmentation of resurrection into resurrect + ion was possible because English had examples of Latinate words in the form of verb and verb+-ion pairs, such as opine/opinion. These became the pattern for many more such pairs, where a verb derived from a Latin supine stem and a noun ending in ion entered the language together, such as insert/insertion, project/projection, etc.

The verb translate is a back formation from translation, which is from Latin trans - lat + -io[n]. Lat- is from the very irregular (suppletive) verb ferre 'to carry.' Translat- in Latin was merely a semi-adjectival form of transferre meaning '[something] having been carried across [into a new language]' (cf. transfer). The result of the action transferre textum 'to translate a text' was a textus translatus 'a text that has been translated.' Thus the verb in English is really from a (semi-)adjectival form in Latin.

Back-formation may be similar to the reanalyses of folk etymologies when it rests on an erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For example, the singular noun asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets is originally not a plural; it is a loanword from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez). The -s was reanalyzed as a plural suffix.

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