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My question regards the words Cubanization, finger, danger and membrane.
- Cardenas: The 'Cubanization' of Venezuela [http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/14/one-of-the-greatest-ironies-of-the-late-strongman-/]
Is the stem of the noun Cubanization the adjective Cuban or the verb Cubanize? My guess is that Cubanize is the stem of the word, though it has not entered all English dictionaries yet.
I looked up in Oxford Dictionaries Online and found that there is also a suffix -ization, apart form -ation. Which is more accurate to consider here?
2. Are finger, danger and membrane simple or derived words? Is -er a suffix in the words danger and finger? Is -ane a suffix in the word membrane?
My guess is that finger and danger are simple words and -er is not a suffix in these words, and membrane is a derived word, formed by suffixatiom. Is that right?
Concerning item 2, the OxED seems to agree with you. The etymologies of the first two do not shed much light, but the third one is interesting:
Etymology: A borrowing from Latin. Etymon: Latin membr?na.
< classical Latin membr?na a membrane (in animal bodies), parchment < membrum member n. + -?na , feminine of -?nus -an suffix.
Classical Latin membr?na probably represents use as noun of the feminine of an adjective in -?nus derived < membrum . Such an adjective is unrecorded in classical Latin (compare post-classical Latin membranus made of parchment: 1397 in a British source), but two hypotheses have been advanced concerning the likely circumstances of the development of such a form. One is as a development from the classical Latin sense of membrum ‘part of the body’, thus having the basic sense ‘covering a part of the body’; however, while membr?na is recorded early in classical Latin in Lucretius, it is not recorded with reference to human skin (i.e., the external covering of a part of the body) earlier than the Vulgate. The second, and perhaps more likely, hypothesis is that the noun membr?na is an early derivative < membrum in a sense ‘flesh’, which is unrecorded but which is plausible in light of the meanings of cognate words in a number of other languages (see merus n.).Early borrowings of the Latin word are Hellenistic Greek ???????? , Byzantine Greek ????????? parchment, Gothic maimbrana parchment. Many of the major European languages show borrowings in the late medieval or early modern period: compare Middle High German membrane (14th cent.; German Membran , Membrane ), Middle French, French membrane (15th cent. in isolated use in Chauliac: see quot. ?a1425 at sense 1a; otherwise 16th cent.), Italian membrana (14th cent. in sense ‘parchment’, 16th cent. in sense 1), Spanish membrana (c1490). Senses parallel to senses 1 and 2 occur in all of these languages except French, which lacks the sense ‘parchment’.
Added in edit: I am sorry, but the Greek letters and long a's look good in the editor but become question marks when posted.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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