We INfer and DEfer. Do We Ever Just Fer?

Also, why do we pronounce a word like “sugar” with an sh sound?

We hope you enjoy the second installment of our new biweekly Q&A — for paid subscribers only — with Lexicon Valley host John McWhorter. Please keep the questions coming, from grammar to etymology to really anything at all that strikes you as even tangentially related to language and how we use it. Just leave a comment below or send an email to lexiconvalley@booksmartstudios.org. And thanks so much for your generous support of everything we do here at Booksmart!

Michael D. asks: Could you please shed light on some particles that appear in many words but everyday speakers barely notice? I’m thinking of the “ment” in words like “basement” and “pavement”; “dis” in “discover” and “disturb”; and “a” in “ashore” and “alive.”

Those, folks, are what linguists call “derivational morphology,” but a more humane way to describe them is that they are prefixes and suffixes that make a word into a new one. Often it changes the part of speech: the adjective happy becomes the noun happiness. But it can also just make a new version of the word that is of the same part of speech: the noun base becomes a base-ment. Often the original root word is no longer used — we disturb someone but cannot “turb” them, or anything for that matter, anymore. Think also of confer, defer, transfer, and refer — all of them are about adding a prefix to fer, but what’s a fer? It was originally a word in Latin referring to movement, but that’s, well, Greek to us now.