The proper definition of a root seems to be: what is common to a certain number of words felt by the popular instinct of the speakers as etymologically belonging together. In this sense we may of course speak of roots at any stage of any language, and not only at a hypothetical initial stage. In some cases these roots may be used as separate words (E. preach, fun, etc., Fr. roul = what is spelt roule, roules, roulent); in other cases this is impossible (Lat. am in amo, amor, amicus; E. sorr); in many cases because the common element cannot, for phonetic reasons, be easily pronounced, as when E. drink, drank, drunk or sit, sat, seat, set are naturally felt to belong together, though it is impossible to state the root except in some formula like dr.nk, s.t, where the dot stands for some vowel. Similar considerations may be adduced with regard to the consonants if we want to establish what is felt to be common in give and gift (gi + labiodental spirant) or in speak and speech, etc.; but this need not detain us here.
In my view, then, the root is something real and important, though not always tangible. And as its form is not always easy to state or pronounce, so must its meaning, as a rule, be somewhat vague and indeterminate, for what is common to several ideas must of course be more general and abstract than either of the more special ideas thus connected; it is also natural that it will often be necessary to state the signification of a root in terms of verbal ideas, for these are more general and abstract than nominal ideas. But roots thus conceived belong to any and all periods, and we must cease to speak of the earliest period of human speech as ‘the root period.’
XIX.—§ 7. The Agglutination Theory.
According to the received theory (see above, § [1]) some of the roots became gradually attached to other roots and lost their independence, so as to become finally formatives fused with the root. This theory, generally called the agglutination theory, contains a good deal of truth; but we can only accept it with three important provisos, namely, first, that there has never been one definite period in which those languages which are now flexional were wholly agglutinative, the process of fusion being liable to occur at any time; second, that the component parts which become formatives are not at first roots, but real words; and third, that this process is not the only one by which formatives may develop: it may be called the rectilinear process, but by the side of that we have also more circuitous courses, which are no less important in the life of languages for being less obvious.
In the process of coalescence or integration there are many possible stages, which may be denominated figuratively by such expressions as that two words are placed together (that is—in non-figurative language—pronounced after one another), tied together, knit together, glued together (‘agglutinated’), soldered together, welded together, fused together or amalgamated. What is really the most important part of the process is the degree in which one of the components loses its independence, phonetically and semantically.
As ‘agglutination’ is thus only one intermediate stage in a continuous process, it would be better to have another name for the whole theory of the origin of formatives than ‘the agglutination theory,’ and I propose therefore to use the term ‘coalescence theory.’ The usual name also fixes the attention too exclusively on the so-called agglutinative languages, and if we take the formatives of such a language as Turkish, as in sev-mek ‘to love,’ sev-il-mek ‘to be loved,’ sev-dir-mek ‘to cause to love,’ sev-dir-il-mek ‘to be made to love,’ sev-ish-mek ‘to love one another,’ sev-ish-dir-il-mek ‘to be made to love one another’—who will vouch that these formatives were all of them originally independent words? Those who are most competent to have an opinion on the matter seem nowadays inclined to doubt it and to reject much of what was current in the description of these languages given by the earlier scholars; see, especially, the interesting final chapter of V. Grønbech, Forstudier til tyrkisk lydhistorie (København, 1902).
XIX.—§ 8. Coalescence.
The various degrees of coalescence, and the coexistence at the same linguistic period of these various degrees, may be illustrated by the old example, English un-tru-th-ful-ly, and by German un-be-stimm-bar-keit. Let us look a little at each of these formatives. The only one that can still be used as an independent word is ful(l). From the collocation in ‘I have my hand full of peas’ the transition is easy to ‘a handful of peas,’ where the accentual subordination of full to hand paves the way for the combination becoming one word instead of two: this is not accomplished till it becomes possible to put the plural sign at the end (handfuls, thus also basketfuls and others), while in less familiar combinations the s is still placed in the middle (bucketsful, two donkeysful of children, see MEG ii. 2. 42). In these substantives -ful keeps its full vowel . But in adjectival compounds, such as peaceful, awful, there is a colloquial pronunciation with obscured or omitted vowel [-fəl, -fl], in which the phonetic connexion with the full word is thus weakened; the semantic connexion, too, is loosened when it becomes possible to form such words as dreadful, bashful, in which it is not possible to use the definition ‘full of ...’ Here, then, the transition from a word to a derivative suffix is complete.
English -hood, -head in childhood, maidenhead also is originally an independent word, found in OE. and ME. in the form had, meaning ‘state, condition,’ Gothic haidus. In German it has two forms, -heit, as in freiheit, and -keit, whose k was at first the final sound of the adjective in ewigkeit, MHG. ewecheit, but was later felt as part of the suffix and then transferred to cases in which the stem had no k, as in tapferkeit, ehrbarkeit.