Knowledge, Understanding, & Cranberries

One of my clients was referred to an old post in a ginormous SWI Facebook group in which the Group Matron made the claim that the word <knowledge> "is not analyzeable in a word sum."

That is one heck of a foolish claim, considering that you can see the <know> base element right there in it.

That's pretty much what my client responded in a comment to the Group Matron, countering, "However, we do have the free base <know> and multiple suffixes following it," and then she gives several examples: knows, knowing, unknown, unknowable. "I hope to learn more about the 'ledge' part," she continues. She calls it a "one-off suffix" and says that that's "not a problem." She points to the suffix <-ne> in just the words done and gone. It's also in the word borne, but most people don't understand that. My client's comments make sense.

The Group Matron, however, makes a silly decree and erroneously tries to support it by throwing Etymonline's entry for knowledge under the bus. The entry states that "The second element is obscure, perhaps from Scandinavian and cognate with the -lock 'action, process,' found in wedlock."

Says the Group Matron, "When the origin is unclear and without evidence that this is a suffix in another spelling, we leave the [entire word's] spelling as a free base. <knowledge> is not analyzeable in a word sum." De. Cree.

But is the <ledge> in knowledge analyzable? If so, is it a base element or a suffix? How do we know, and does the Group Matron actually understand how to use etymological information to answer morphological questions?

No, she doesn't. There is a glaring clue in the Etymonline entry that she misses entirely.

I've posted before about how to know if written words can be analyzed, and how to use Etymonline – which is not Morphonline – to confirm or falsify morphological hypotheses. I've written previously about the difference between a morpheme being analyzable and being productive. But I'm gonna write about it all again, here, and now.

I'm also gonna offer some bussin' Pop-Up classes – one of which will be on exacly this kind of question – through the end of 2024 at the end of this post.