Frequentatives
Two weeks ago in the comments after the Onomatopoeia post, Christine
asked about the words dive, mucus, cough & flutter. Of the three, only cough is onomatopoeic, & appeared in
English somewhat dubiously in the 1300s from a German source. Though it didn’t
pass the onomatopoeic test, the word flutter led me down the path that introduced me to the topic of this post.
Thank you Christine.
Flutter appears to have been around since we started
calling our language English. Linguists refer to flutter as a frequentative
verb. This particular sort of verb is built from a verb that
communicates a single action. The frequentative verb communicates that
same action, repeated. Flutter’s parent verb is float.
With a bit of imagination we can see how fluttering is a bit like floating
over & over again.
Ripple came to English in the 1400s from the word rip.
It hadn’t previously occurred to me that ripples in a stream could be
perceived as many, many rips in the water’s surface.
In the 1580s, the parent
verb drip gave us the frequentative verb dribble.
Soccer players applied this word to their sport as early as 1863, & it
made its way onto the basketball court by 1892, only one year after the
“invention” of the sport.
To sway from side to side, as a duck does, is to waddle. Given the definition, it’s
no surprise that waddle’s parent verb is wade. Waddle appeared in English in
the 1590s.
Another frequentative
word that came about in the 1590s is puzzle. We can see the associated
shade of meaning in its parent verb, pose within the phrase pose a riddle.
Straddle is most likely a frequentative form of the verb stride.
English users first wrote straddle about 1560.
The 1590s brought us the
wonderful figurative word muddle, frequentative of mud.
It seems likely that muddle initially meant to
bathe in mud, then by the 1600s, muddle picked up its figurative
meaning, to destroy the clarity of.
The frequentative verb ogle
showed up in writing in the 1680s & comes from the OId English word for
eye, oege.
Frequentatives abound!
Even as I finish this entry, I feel more posts on this theme bubbling under the
surface of my blogworthy self.
Had any of you heard of frequentatives?
Any thoughts on them?