Classical Compound - The Conservative Tradition

The Conservative Tradition

From the Renaissance until the mid-20th century, the concept of derivational purity has generally regulated the use of classical compounds: Greek with Greek, Latin with Latin, and a minimum of hybridization. Biography is Greek, agriculture Latin, but television is a hybrid of Greek tele- and Latin -vision (probably so coined because the ‘pure’ form telescope had already been adopted for another purpose). Most dictionaries follow the OED in using combining form (comb. form) to label such classical elements, but the name is not widely known. In appendices to dictionaries and grammar books, classical compounds are often loosely referred to as roots or affixes: ‘a logo …, properly speaking, is not a word at all but a prefix meaning word and short for logogram, a symbol, much as telly is short for television’ (Montreal Gazette, 13 Apr. 1981). They are often referred to as affixes because some come first and some come last, but if they were affixes, a word like biography would have no base whatever. While affixes are grammatical (like prepositions), classical compounds are lexical (like nouns, adjectives, and verbs): for example, bio- translates as a noun (life), -graphy as a verbal noun (writing). They are also often loosely called roots because they are ancient and have a basic role in word formation, but functionally and often structurally they are distinct from roots: the -graph in autograph is both a root and a classical compound, while the -graphy in cryptography consists of root -graph- and suffix -y, and is only a classical compound.