Our language is incredibly diverse, but did you think how it is replenished? Where do the new words come from? Sometimes they get into the Russian language from other languages, they are called borrowed. And sometimes native speakers themselves create new words in a variety of ways.
Have you ever met the term “interfix”, raised your eyebrows in surprise and strained your brain, trying to remember what interfix is, and did you meet this word at school in Russian lessons? This article contains answers to many of your questions related to this diverse and amazing part of the word.
Interfix is what?
Formed from the Latin inter - "between" and fīxus - "attached". Interfix is a part used to form new words. With the help of this affix, two roots are connected, or, quite rarely, the root and the suffix.
At school, the term "interfix" is rarely used, they prefer "connecting vowels". However, this term does not cover all interfixes. Most often, this concept only means such vowels as O and E. Interfix is only partly connecting vowels.
Affix is the part of a word that joins the root and brings in a new grammatical or word-formation meaning (prefix, postfix, confix, inflection).
What are the interfixes?
The most common interfixes in the Russian language are E and O. But besides them, there are others in the Russian language: U, I, A, IM, UX, EX, W, Y, L, B. Examples of words with interfixes: self- o-years, birds-e-lov, two-piece, six-story, sum-a-come down, uh-im-ets, two-hour-watch, three-story, coffee in-room, pe-in-ets
Talking about how many interfixes are in the Russian language is difficult, because there are so many of them. This article presents only the most common. Sometimes interfixes are used only once, for only one word.
Is interfix a morpheme?
The question of the possibility of highlighting insignificant intermorphic segments in words is one of the main questions of morphemic word division. In the language literature, such meaningless elements are called interfixes. The term "interfix" was proposed by Alexei Mikhailovich Sukhotin, and adopted in most works on word formation. The works of the linguist and professor of philological sciences Elena Andreevna Zemskaya, in which much attention is paid to insignificant intermorphic segments, have contributed to the popularization of this term.
Interfix is the smallest part of a word that has no meaning. It performs only a connecting function, in contrast to them prefixes, postfixes and confixes that carry a certain semantic load in the composition of the word. And if you put interfixes on a par with significant morphemes, then the term "morpheme" (the least significant part of a word) loses its meaning. Tikhonov in his works emphasizes that, with the possibility of the existence of asematic affixes ...
the concept of a morpheme is split, <...> the boundaries of a morpheme become vague and vague.
The absence of meaning in interfixes can easily be proved by comparing the same word-formation form, which is sometimes expressed with the help of the interfix, and sometimes without it. For example: purr and meow.
The words “purr” and “meow” refer to the same type of word formation, however, the absence of the connection “ly” in the word “meow” and its presence in the word “purr” does not affect the meaning at all. This part has no share in the sense of the word.