Alcoholic - one addicted to alcohol
Marathon - an endurance running race of 26.2 miles.
Chop the tails off the above and you can construct:
Workaholic, chocoholic, etc. (though sadly not narcotoholic)
Danceathon, saleathon, etc.
Are there other examples of suffixes like -oholic and -athon surgically grafted from other words? Is there a name for this linguistic phenomenon?
Something-phobic.
Something-phrenic (usually done humorously, oddly enough).
Something-rific (indicating terrific, rather than horrific).
I blame the Germans.
Watergate - leading to <blank>gates of all sorts.
I haven’t found a real authoritative one. Some people refer to them as pseudo-suffixes.
Eh, a portmanteau suffix? Haven’t found an official name for it, but it describes it decently.
Another one is “burger.”
Portmanteau or pseudo, both work individually. Perhaps pseudomanteau suffix?
Another one: -licious
[something]-mania
[something]-orama
(Sorry for the double post, I thought of these too far apart)
Do -phobia and -mania count? I thought they were true suffixes.
-arium like orphanarium
I agree. Those have standalone roots, not just a convenenient terminal syllable that can be appropriated for other uses.
How are we (if we are) excluding any productive noun-forming suffix? Like -ness, -ism, -ist . . .
An official term for these partially productive affixes is splinter.
Here, from russian source:Дубенец Э.М. Курс лекций и планы семинарских занятий по лексикологии английского языка скачать, читать бесплатно
In the second half of the twentieth century the English wordbuilding system was enriched by creating so called splinters which scientists include in the affixation stock of the Modern English wordbuilding system. Splinters are the result of clipping the end or the beginning of a word and producing a number of new words on the analogy with the primary word-group. For example, there are many words formed with the help of the splinter mini- (apocopy produced by clipping the word «miniature»), such as «miniplane», «minijet», «minicycle», «minicar», «miniradio» and many others. All of these words denote obects of smaller than normal dimensions.
On the analogy with «mini-» there appeared the splinter «maxi»- (apocopy produced by clipping the word «maximum»), such words as «maxi-series», «maxi-sculpture», «maxi-taxi» and many others appeared in the language.
When European economic community was organized quite a number of neologisms with the splinter Euro- (apocopy produced by clipping the word «European») were coined, such as: «Euratom» «Eurocard», «Euromarket», «Europlug», «Eurotunnel» and many others. These splinters are treated sometimes as prefixes in Modern English.
There are also splinters which are formed by means of apheresis, that is clipping the beginning of a word. The origin of such splinters can be variable, e.g. the splinter «burger» appeared in English as the result of clipping the German borrowing «Hamburger» where the morphological structure was the stem «Hamburg» and the suffix -er. However in English the beginning of the word «Hamburger» was associated with the English word «ham», and the end of the word «burger» got the meaning «a bun cut into two parts». On the analogy with the word «hamburger» quite a number of new words were coined, such as: «baconburger», «beefburger», «cheeseburger», «fishburger» etc
And here’s a source that is not based on a website from the erstwhile Evil Empire.
I’d go short of calling it “official,” though. It was coined only back in 1961, and doesn’t seem to have caught on particularly well.
“…Meistersinger” as coined by SNL IIRC… A mocking add-on. The spin doctors in politics are also spinmeisters.
Meister is a noun in its own right, though - if a compound noun phrase including meister is written as one word, that does not make the individual components suffixes or prefixes. Same goes for fest.
“Splinter” is used in many papers/articles on english morphology.
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=eqn%2Ccconf%3D1.0%2Cmin_length%3D2%2Crate_low%3D0.025%2Crate_high%3D0.025%2Csecond_pass%3Dfalse%2Cnum_suggestions%3D2%2Cignore_bad_origquery%3Dtrue&gs_nf=1&gs_mss=splinter%20mor&tok=RnV5Aj_ibjSPhphxxeqfJw&cp=31&gs_id=1jo&xhr=t&q=splinter+morphology+linguistics&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=splinter+morphology+linguistics&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=cfe6d45e784e16e2&biw=1066&bih=541
What do you find as alternatives? Clipping… I remember that from morphology papers
I think the “reusable” (productive) part is the affix.
burgermeister
grillmeister
spinmeister
I agree with ** Švejk** that “meister” doesn’t really count.
Another one: “literati” has given rise to glitterati, Twitterati and probably some other more obscure ones.
“-ola”, as in “payola” also spread to other nouns, similar to the “-gate” suffix, to reflect shady goings-on. Link.