Contents introduction 2

2.3. Back-formation
It is possible to illustrate this type of word building using an example of words beg - beggar. The word beggar was formed from the verb to beg, and on the contrary: the word borrowed from the French language beggard was formed under influence and by analogy to nouns with a suffix -er. The second syllable of the noun beggar was apprehended as a suffix, and the verb was formed by rejection of this suffix. In etymology, back-formation refers to the process of creating a new lexeme (less precisely, a new “word”) by removing actual or supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation. Back-formations are shortened words created from longer words, thus back-formations may be viewed as a sub-type of clipping. 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 many examples of Latinate words that had verb and verb+-ion pairs - in these pairs the -ion suffix is added to verb forms in order to create nouns (such as, insert/insertion, project/projection, etc.).⁹
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 loan-word from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez). The -s was reanalyzed as a plural suffix. Many words came into English by this route: Pease was once a mass noun but was reinterpreted as a plural, leading to the back-formation pea. The noun statistic was likewise a back-formation from the field of study statistics. In Britain the verb burgle came into use in the 19th century as a back-formation from burglar (which can be compared to the North America verb burglarize formed by suffixation). Even though many English words are formed this way, new coinages may sound strange, and are often used for humorous effect. For example, gruntled or pervious (from disgruntled and impervious) would be considered mistakes today, and used only in humorous contexts. The comedian George Gobel regularly used original back-formations in his humorous monologues. Bill Bryson mused that the English language would be richer if we could call a tidy-haired person shevelled - as an opposite to dishevelled. Frequently back-formations begin in colloquial use and only gradually become accepted. For example, enthuse (from enthusiasm) is gaining popularity, though it is still considered substandard by some today. The immense celebrations in Britain at the news of the relief of the Siege of Mafeking briefly created the verb to maffick, meaning to celebrate both extravagantly and publicly. “Maffick” was a back-formation from Mafeking, a place-name that was treated humorously as a gerund or participle.¹⁰
There is a lot of different example of back formation in English language:
ablute from ablution
aesthete from aesthetic
air-condition from air conditioning
alm from alms
arch (“to practice archery”) from archery
attrit from attrition
auto-destruct from auto-destruction (auto-destroy)
automate from automation
bicep from biceps (non-standard)
biograph from biography
blockbust from blockbuster
book-keep from book-keeping
cavitate from cavitation
cherry from Old French cerise
choate from inchoate
choreograph from choreography
claustrophobe from claustrophobia
darkle from darkling
decadent from decadence
deconstruct from deconstruction
dedifferentiate from dedifferentiation
emote from emotion
enthuse from enthusiasm
ept from inept
escalate from escalator
eutrophicate from eutrophication
extrapose from extraposition.
Back-formations of borrowed terms generally do not follow the rules of the original language. For example Homo sapiens is Latin for thinking man. As with all Linnaean species names, this is singular in Latin (plural would be homines sapientes) but it is sometimes mistakenly treated as plural in English, with the corresponding singular back-formation Homo sapien. Some regard such divergence as incorrect, or as a mark of ignorance. Others assert that a language is determined by its usage and that strictly applying such a principle of correctness would render English a highly irregular blend of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, French and every other language from which it had ever borrowed.