Latin Suffixal Derivatives in English and Their Indo-European Ancestry

This is the fullest account ever published of Latin suffixes in English. It explores the rich variety of English words formed by the addition of one or more Latin suffixes, such as ial, -able, -ability, -ible, and -id. It traces the histories of over 3,000 words and reveals the range of derivational patterns in Indo-European, Latin, and English. It makes an important contribution to the history of English and Latin morphology and etymology, as well as to the history of suffixal derivation in Indo-European.

D. Gary Miller is Professor of Linguistics and Classics at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969, with a dissertation on Studies in Some Forms of the Genitive Singular in Indo-European. As well as numerous articles on Indo-European, classical, and general linguistics, his publications include Homer and the Ionian Epic Tradition (1982), Improvization, Typology, Culture, and 'The New Orthodoxy': How 'Oral' is Homer? (1982), Complex Verb Formation (1993), Ancient Scripts and Phonological Knowledge (1994), Nonfinite Structures in Theory and Change (2002), and the two-volume work Language Change and Linguistic Theory (2011).