(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)
In
Post 11 ("Wordhood Cubed?") I suggested among other things that, where
P- stands for "any prepositional
prefix," any word of the form P-oste-um
would imply the existence of a large number of words of the form P-X-N (where X names a concrete object and -N
denotes any nominative singular ending), with a predictable
"standard" meaning:
P-X-N = something located in the relationship
to X
specified
by P.
The observation that neither P-oste-um nor P-X-N are particularly well-attested led us to consider the further
postulates, first that
any
P-X-A (examples being many)
presupposes a corresponding P-X-N;
and, second, that actually
any
word of the form P-X-Z (where -Z stands for any ending at all), also
presupposes
a corresponding P-X-N.
Note that I didn't put this last postulate
into so many words, but that this formulation is the logical result of our look
at words of the form P-X-itis, where
P-X-ITIS = the inflammation of
something
located in the relationshp to X
specified
by P
=
the inflammation of
P-X-N.
The
argument from P-X-A was almost
parallel, but a little more convoluted.
Now I can admit that the convolution arose from putting the more
difficult case first: as students of TheAnatomy of Medical Terminology know (from Chapter 13), there is always a "Plan B"
translation for any word of this shape:
P-X-A = pertaining to
something
located in the relationship to X
specified
by P
= pertaining to P-X-N!
So
far so good, or so I hope. But I've been
promising another look at the considerations which started this line of thought,
and the example from which we began; perhaps I can put it this way:
If
a large number of words exists of the general form P-X-N, then a relatively large number of words of the specific form
P-OSTE-UM (relative to the the number
of specific forms of P) should also
exist. But, as we saw, only two are
actually directly attested, out of more than twenty that "should"
exist given that there are at least twenty productive prepositional prefixes
running around out there in the real world.
By
now the plan of attack I have in mind is probably obvious; the key phrase in
the preceding sentence is "directly attested," with emphasis on
"directly." What we were
working with in the "Wordhood Cubed" post--the evidence arising from
analogous words like P-X-A and P-X-ITIS--could be called a process of
"indirect attesting" to the reality of the target words P-X-N.
And
such is the evidence that as it were "surrounds" the putative nouns
of the form P-OSTE-UM. As we have seen, end-oste-um (Post 2) is well-attested; peri-oste-um is also found "in the dictionary." They are listed below; in aid of some of the
"missing" others, so are the following words, all of the form P-OSTE-Z (where -Z denotes any ending at all; the asterisk "*" denotes
that a word is not directly attested):
WORD OUR TRANSLATION
PERI-oste-um the part SURROUNDING a bone
END-oste-um the part INSIDE a bone
ECT-oste-al pertaining to
something
OUTSIDE a bone
=
the *ECT-oste-um
INTER-osse-ous pertaining to
something
BETWEEN bones
= the *INTER-osse-um
=
the *INTER-osTe-um
(see
below, on synonyms, for the skipped step)
SYN-oste-otomy the cutting of
"bones-TOGETHER"
(translated as "a joint")
=
a *SYN-oste-um
(by
admittedly tortured logic!)
The following synonyms are also attested:
INTRA-oste-al <cross-referenced to INTRA-osse-ous>
INTRA-osse-ous pertaining to
something
INSIDE a bone
=
the *INTRA-osse-um
=
the *INTRA-osTe-um
=
the END-oste-um (above; attested)
ENT-ost-osis <cross-referenced to EN-ost-osis>
EN-ost-osis = *END-ostE-osis
(see
Post 2 for the gory details!)
*END-oste-osis an abnormal condition involving
something
INSIDE a bone
= END-oste-um (above; attested)
=
*EN-oste-um
=
*ENT-oste-um
Analogously,
the following form presupposes a synonym for *ECT-oste-um:
EX-ost-osis an abnormal condition involving
something
OUTSIDE a bone
=
the *EX-ostE-um
=
the *ECT-oste-um.
Synonymity
is itself another "multiplier" in terms of "real but unattested
words" (see a forthcoming Post): as cross-listings in the dictionaries
show, pretty much any synonymous combining form can be substituted for another
(see also The Anatomy of Medical
Terminology, passim). In the
examples above, the combining forms oste-
and osse- are synonymous; therefore a
"fully-expanded count" of the words we are considering here would also
include those generated by a rule like
for
every P-OSTE-UM attested directly or
indirectly, there is a synonym
P-OSSE-UM; and vice versa.
Similarly,
just as end-, en-, ent- and intra- are
synonymous (as we saw above), so too are prefixes denoting the opposite
locational relationship, "outside," namely, extra-, ex-, and ect-. Therefore *EXTRA-oste-um and, of course, *EXTRA-osse-um,
have to join the club (along with *ECT-oste-um
and *EX-oste-um, indirectly attested
above).
Nor
do these "indirect attestations" exhaust the possibilities we have
opened up here. Just because no current
word seems to exist suggesting that the concepts expressed by the phrases listed
below denote useful objects, does that mean that one or more of the candidate
words listed beside them may not someday be just as real as periosteum and the rest?
CONCEPT/DEFINITION CANDIDATE WORD(S)
something
UPON a bone *EPI-oste-um
something
BELOW a bone *SUB-oste-um, *INFRA-oste-um
something
BESIDE a bone *PARA-oste-um
something
BEFORE a bone *PRE-oste-um
There
is more to say about all this. For now,
notice how we have been able to use the concepts applied to the derivation of
the "meta-rule" about P-X-N
in the Post "Wordhood Cubed" to considerably expand the count of
arguably real words symbolized by the much more specific template P-oste-um.
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