Roots 
A sponge for words
Deepti

Quite like an absent-minded professor, English keeps borrowing ‘loan words’ from other languages and forgets to return them. These words are ensconced so comfortably in the English parlour that even their mother languages can’t recognise them. Often, the words blend seamlessly in English and only an expert etymologist can spot them; for instance, the words ‘monk, bishop, priest and church’ come from Latin and the words ‘curt, miracle, privilege and lamp’ are from French.

If the ‘borrowing’ were to stop here, the task of recognition would have been too simple. But English is an old hand at this ‘loan taking’. So, prefixes and suffixes are taken from other languages and are added on to English words. How many people can point out that the prefixes in the words ‘pre-war, post-war and disown’ are originally Latin? Or, that the suffixes in ‘merriment, righteous, likable and riddance’ belong to French?

Through years of usage, ‘loan’ words become so ‘English’ that they cannot be traced back to their language of origin. From Shakespeare, the word ‘mob’ reached everywhere. Only a historian can now trace ‘mob’ to the Latin ‘mobile vulgus’, or the ‘fickle crowd’. By the early eighteenth century, it had become the simple ‘mob’ to refer to a crowd of commoners. To possess ‘mob’ further, an interesting coinage occurred.

The Greek loan ‘democracy’ which is made up of ‘demos’ or ‘people’ and ‘krateia’ or ‘rule’ became a naturalised citizen of English and gave its ending ‘cracy’ to the word ‘mob’ creating ‘mobocracy’, an informally used English word. So, a Latin loan gets shortened and takes on a suffix from a Greek loan: a suffix that is more of a hybrid rather than a pure suffix. Isn’t this enough to give a lifetime mission to an etymologist?

English is a global language today because of its assimilating skill. In the same vein, there is no trace of Latin in the word ‘recipe’ which was the Latin imperative that meant ‘take’. Normally, cooking instructions begin with the phrase ‘Take these ingredients…’and in the past too, this phrase was the beginning in cookery, hence ‘recipe’ was the first word.