What is it about?
In the past three decades we have come to understand the theoretical basis for words changing over time into suffixes and prefixes. The path between words and affixes tends to include the category of affixoid. Jacob Grimm's 19th-century theorizing corroborates and enriches much of our modern theorizing, especially his remarks in his 1826 volume titled Deutsche Grammatik.
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Why is it important?
Grimm's theorizing on affixoids developing over time is neglected in the literature. His ideas not only corroborate many of our current hypotheses in this debated area of research, but he points out further paths of investigation, e.g., 1) when both prefixoidization and suffixoidization are possible in a single structure, then suffixoidization should take place; 2) affixoidization does not take place in equal measure for all languages and all varieties of a given language; and 3) certain semantics tend to be associated with different types of German affixoids.
Perspectives
Researching this article allowed me to delve deeply into 19th-century scholarship, and the more I learned, the more I found how commonplace it is for modern scholarship to bypass much older work. It is sobering and exciting to see the depth of earlier scholarship that was completed without modern research tools.
Douglas Lightfoot
The University of Alabama
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Germanic affixoids in Jacob Grimm, Historiographia Linguistica, July 2025, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/hl.00180.lig.
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