#infixes

[prokopetz]

Settle an argument: where do you infix "fucking" in the name of Kalamazoo, Michigan?

Kalafuckingmazoo

Kalamafuckingzoo

Other (I'm a big weirdo)

I have no strong opinions about fucking Kalamazoo

Voting ended onSep 17, 2025

[leman-vjossa]

BA Linguistics is going well

[go-learn-esperanto]

Go ahead, put anything

You probably know about suffixes and prefixes yes?

Disprove - dis is a prefix that means that that the word means the opposite of the word attached to it

Finally - ly is a suffix that mean the word is an adverb

But did you know about infixes?

Infix is a type of afix that's located in the middle of the word.

English (and Spanish I think) doesn't have this, at least formally, but Portuguese does!

An example:

If I wanted to say I'm going to eat something in English I'd say

I'm going to eat it

Or

I'll eat it

In Portuguese you have multiple ways of going about this too.

The verb to eat is comer by the way

vou comê-lo/comê-la

Equivalent to I'm going to eat it. It's technically present describing the future. The -lo/-la are the pronouns you might use. They are gendered because in Portuguese even a cookie is gendered. It's female btw

O/A comerei

Equivalent to I'll eat it but very poetic. Not usually used in casual speach. O/A are the pronouns. Probably more common in Brazilian Portuguese.

Comê-lo-ei/comê-la-ei

Somehow more likely to be said than the second option (in Portugal at least). This option doesn't exist in English. And yes, the prounun is literally in the middle of the word. That's the infix. It's a very weird thing that's still used and I hope people don't stop using it because it's a very peculiar gramatical rule that's very funky.

That being said it is a bitch to remember.

There's some weird Portuguese contraptions.

I can say

Dar-lho-ei

And that'll mean "I'll give it to him".

That thing classifies as one word when in English it's a whole ass sentence.

You can have infixes in very colloquial English. An example is

Fan-fucking-tastic

Not exactly a word in the dictionary but it's indeed an infix.

[allthingslinguistic]

Abso-b████y-lutely: Expletive Infixation

There are rules in the English language that you've probably never been taught, but you know anyway: how to split apart words with "infixes". But you've never been taught it because some of those infixes are words you probably shouldn't use in front of your high school English teachers...

It’s a new Language Files video with me, Tom Scott, and Molly Ruhl! For more linguistics of swearing, check out the following Lingthusiasm episodes: 

Real swear words and pseudo-swears

The grammar of swearing 

[datasoong47]

In Alan Yu’s A Natural History of Infixation, he cites a case where an infix developed from a reanalysis of a reduplicating prefix after sound changes had obscured it slightly.

This took place in an Algic language known as Yurok, in northwestern California.  In Proto-Algic, there’s a reduplicative prefix *C(C)eː- indicating intensive action.  This became *C(C)e- in an ancestral form of Yurok.  Two crucial sound changes were involved in the reanalysis of this.

The first is the fact that stem-initial /h/ is lost after pronominal prefixes.  Thus, for example, the verb helomey- “to dance”, becomes ʔnelomey “I dance”, with the /h/ lost after the prefix ʔne-.  As a result, the historic stem-initial /h/ rarely (if ever) actually surfaces.  There are no underlying vowel-initial forms in the language.

However, when the reduplication occurs, the /h/ surfaces.  A form starting with hVC- would become hehVC-, but in both cases the initial /h/ is lost after the pronominal prefixes.  Hence, a form such as the ʔn-elomey above would become ʔn-e-helomey.

The second relevant change is that /h/ became /ɣ/ (written g) between vowels.  So that a forms such as ʔnehelomey became ʔnegelomey.  A reanalysis followed where the historically correct division ʔn-(h)e-gelomey was reanalyzed as ʔn-eg-elomey, with -eg- being interpreted as an infix placed after the onset of the first syllable.  This new analysis then spread to other verbs.  Thus, forms such as laːy- become legaːy- in this form.  It also applies to complex onsets, such as ɫkyorkʷ- → ɫkyegorkʷ-.  Not all verbs have adopted this new form, some preserve the original C(C)(e)-  prefix.  E.g., kelomen- “to turn” becomes kekelomen- “to turn several things”, not *kegelomen-, and ckɹckɹː- “to pierce” becomes ckɹckɹckɹː- “to pierce repeatedly”

A similar phenomenon occurred in Trukese, an Austronesian language spoken in Micronesia.  There is a reduplicative prefix CVC- used with most verbs indicating pluractionality (at least, that’s how Yu labels it, the examples he gives seems to be more of a general habitual or imperfective).  Thus, fætæn “walk” becomes fæf-fætæn “be in the habit of walking”, mɔt “sit” → mɔm-mɔt “be sitting”, etc.

However, in vowel initial verbs, the form is Vkk-, and in w-initial verbs, it’s an infix -Vkk-.  Thus, wɨn “drink” → w-ɨkk-ɨn “be in the habit of drinking” and ɔsɔmʷoːnu “pay chiefly respects to” becomes ɔkk-ɔsɔmʷoːnu “be in the habit of paying chiefly respects to”.

This reflects a historic phenomenon wherein word-initial /k/ was lost.  Thus, for example, that last example was, in an earlier stage, kasamʷóːnu.  The /k/ was lost in that form, along with various vowel changes, to produce ɔsɔmʷoːnu, but when the CVC- prefix was added, that /k/ became word-medial, and was thus preserved, while the initial /k/ of the prefix was lost.  Thus, kak-kasamʷóːnu became ɔkkɔsɔmʷoːnu.  Since that original /k/ was lost, the historic division ɔk-kɔsɔmʷóːnu would’ve been obscured, and it was reanalyzed as ɔkk-ɔsɔmʷóːnu. This new analysis was then spread to other vowel-initial verbs, so that all vowel-initial verbs used a prefix Vkk-, whether or not there was an etymological /k/ (it’s unclear from Yu’s description how original vowel-initial verbs form the pluractional before this reanalysis, or if they perhaps simply were unable to be inflected in that form at all)

Subsequently, a sound change occurred wherein /w/ was added before certain word-initial vowels.  Yu does not go into details about what conditioned this /w/, however, it would’ve been added to both the base form and the Vkk- form.  Thus, the older verb form ínu “to drink”, became ɨn in an intermediate form, which could take the Vkk- prefix to become ɨkkɨn.  Then the /w/ was added, making the forms wɨn and wɨkkɨn.  Since the /w/ is synchronically part of the base, that would cause wɨkkɨn to be analyzed as having an infixed -ɨkk-.  That a -Vkk- infix in such cases is a synchronically valid analysis is demonstrated by the fact that it occurs with borrowed words as well.  Thus, wiːk “week”, becomes wikkiːk “be for a number of weeks”

[allthingslinguistic]

Cheer-damnably-ho! 

A 1928 expletive infix from Dorothy Sayers, via Dennis Baron on twitter.

[okj579]

It seems that English’s newest infix has made it’s way into German. Overheard today: “unfuckingfassbar”