English Is Amazing
This is not in praise of English. I mean English is amazing like Rod Stewart is amazing; meaning how do you two get away with being the way you are? A case:
Comprehend is a word. Comprehendable (or comprehendible) is not a word. Comprehensible means what you might think comprehendable would have meant. Comprehensible and comprehensive as words are not related at all.
Enough people have told me it’s nucular rather than nuclear that I sometimes start to believe it. This is not a problem. Inflammable means flammable? This is a problem. Will enflammable be an acceptable word over time?
ADDED WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2014:
Did comprehendable become comprehensible? Will nuclear become nucular?
ADDED WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2014, but later in the day:
Is comprehend to comprehense what nucular is to nuclear?
ie:ancient comprehense ⇉ modern comprehendmodern nuclear ⇉ future nucular
After looking up the etymologies of comprehend, comprehensive, and comprehensible, I’d say no, but it’s a little hard to tell how definitive it is, given this is the internet age. There seems to be a common root in the latin word comprehendere or comprehensvius. But by now and in English, I can’t make sense of it and it’s a little hard to to remember that comprehendable is not a word but comprehensible is.
Jae-Ho
There are several possible reasons for this seeming lack of consistency, and one is what you point out at the end – that English, more than any other modern language, is extremely malleable and subject to cultural shifts.
For comprehend/comprehensible in particular, it might be down to conjugation. English has far fewer conjugations than any other language, meaning our verb tenses tend to stay relatively the same as we use them to refer to a hypothetical event in the future, or a finished event in the past. Rather than change the root verb, we add words around it.
English also suffers from the great man theory, in that at certain points in its history great men, always men, felt the need to tinker with it. When Samuel Johnson began his dictionary, the English language was the wild west of languages, with a plethora of spellings, verb conjugations, and syntax.
So, one possible answer for why the nominalised form of comprehend is comprehensible has to do with the journey of that word from Latin to French and finally to English. The root verb in Latin is comprehendere, which has a past participle stem of comprehens. Now why that should be the case is well beyond me, but you can see how that could easily lead to comprehensible, since the nominalised form in Latin is comprehensibilis.
One of the big problems with the way our brains struggle with language might be an unfortunate by product of an earlier attempt to make it easier to understand – namely, applying the burgeoning advances in mathematics to language.
The most famous example of this is probably our stamping out of the double negative, e.g. “I ain’t got none of those.” 300 years ago that would have just meant, I really don’t have what you’re looking for, and we can easily understand the sentence as meaning that now. Only a syntactical screwball would use that construction to mean, yes, I have that. But in the rush to codify pretty much everything, negatives in English were ruled to work the same way as they do in math. (Something George Orwell bemoaned with the rise of the “not un-” construction.
This is mere conjecture, but other languages have no problem negotiating, in the case of Polish, over 20 different verb classes with corresponding changes to nouns. The reason people find English such a difficult language to learn isn’t that we have too many rules, but rather that too many of them only make sense with usage. Goose – geese but not moose – meese. The plural of sheep is sheep. Mouse and mice but not house and hice, and i before e except after c or when rhyming with hay as in neighbour or weigh. So, basically, what?
That was meaty.
Perhaps one take away is, we English speakers often apply grammatical inflection incorrectly, more times than the speaker or the listener realize and that is actually apart of what makes it work. You can butcher English and still communicate quite effectively. And then you can have guys like Joyce and so on.
In a conversation, if one person says comprehendable, the other person will understand it, and furthermore might not even think that this is incorrect. This exchange would have been quite frictionless. (here’s a wild thought: could a necessity to infer intent, even subconsciously, require a more concerted listening effort and attentiveness. As a result, could this engender empathy?)
One rather glaring example where empathy was definitely not generated: the malapropisms of George Walker Bush.
Malapropisms are the kind of thing I worry will become quaintly anachronistic. It’s the source of much of Shakespeare’s humour, notably in Much Ado About Nothing:
Thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption for this.
Were I as tedious as a king, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all on Your Worship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx9SaEhhM0w
I can’t follow Shakespeare performances and therefore never enjoyed them. Dislike them, actually, like a bored teenager. The actors talk too fast. My brain can’t reconcile the malapropisms and what not. Recently, I’ve discovered that reading Shakespeare in small chunks isn’t so bad, as evident in your snippets as opposed to the Youtube video I couldn’t make sense of.
I just watched a Youtube video of George Bush malapropisms. I gotta say, it might have generated some empathy, because I too know intimately the train wreck of the mispeak. I see him working, downright squirming, actually, and I think I, “oh no! You meant this but you said that!.” What it doesn’t generate is sympathy, just the empathy and it stops there.
When you worry that malapropism will become quaintly anachronistic, I assume you only mean the intentional kind. I guess we can delight in and be engaged by malapropisms partly because they a view into a failure of intricate translation from thought to language (intentional or not), and brain failing are wonderful insights. Do you really think it’s something being lost, though? Would that be so bad? Do you find this loss a sign of simple, less dense communication?
It wouldn’t be bad to loosen the reigns of grammar, except that happens all the time already. But to lose that part of comedy, or the comedy that can result in a beautiful collision of word choice and intention, would seem to me to be sad.