frequentative flyers

it turns out that the guy who was sitting next to me on my æroplane was studying linguistics so i axed him what was the hawt new thing in his field that gave him wood every time he thought about it. he didn’t answer me outright but he did tell me a little bit about frequentatives.

according to him, there are some languages (finnish, lithuanian, and turkish) that can slap a suffix on a verb to show that that the verb happens not once, not twice, but frequently. eg. the turkish word anlat means “to recite,” you can stick a -gelmek up in there to make anlatagelmek which means “to be reciting repetitively.” he then gave me a few boring examples in finno-ugric languages and i was about to slip on my blublockers and tune him out when he pinched me hard and said, “raynor, you dope. english has frequentatives too!”

when all the dust settled, he showed me that the english suffix -le is actually an ancient morpheme that allows english speakers to construct their own frequentatives. consider:

• when something frequently sparks, it sparkles.
• i can be dazed once but when i am dazed continuously, i am dazzled.
• if an object cracks without stopping, it crackles.
• and so on with nest/nestle, crumb/crumble, tramp/trample, and wrest/wrestle. 
• of additional interest is how some words like fondle, prattle, and scuttle preserve the verbs fond, prate, and scud which passed out of english usage many æons ago.
• you can find out more on this subject by flyle-ing on delta and sittle-ing next to the dude that i sat next to or by visitle-ing the frequentative wikipedia page here.