Anonymous Posted 21 years ago
Vocabulary
verb to a noun
detain v. detention
abstain v. abstention
this transform from the verb form to the noun form is kind of alien to me.
Hope someone can give more examples to try to complement this category of words.
tks
abstain v. abstention
this transform from the verb form to the noun form is kind of alien to me.
Hope someone can give more examples to try to complement this category of words.
tks
Top answer
It is not a contemporary transformation, Anon. g. Latin words.
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It is not a contemporary transformation, Anon. Such cases result from separate forms far back in the history of the language, or are a result of derivation from different forms of e.g. Latin words.
For example, I see from my dictionary that abstain and abstention both came from L. abstinere, but abstain worked its way through Middle French (abstenir
For example, I see from my dictionary that abstain and abstention both came from L. abstinere, but abstain worked its way through Middle French (abstenir
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As Mr. Micawber has mentioned, this transform is no longer productive in modern English.
There are hundreds of such Latin roots which occur in such pairs. It would probably be impractical to try to learn all the patterns. Nevertheless, if that sort of thing interests you, you might try keeping a list of verb-noun-pair patterns together with the particular verbs which fall into each pa
There are hundreds of such Latin roots which occur in such pairs. It would probably be impractical to try to learn all the patterns. Nevertheless, if that sort of thing interests you, you might try keeping a list of verb-noun-pair patterns together with the particular verbs which fall into each pa
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