Have you brought gold? Have you brought silver to set me free?

[sovay]

This is the best comic I have ever seen about tmesis in the English language and also nearly identical to the example we were given in Latin III, except that instead of ridiculous the host word was unbelievable. It's an actual morphological rule; I believe in English it has to do with syllabic stress (in Latin, it's more strictly the splitting—τμῆσις—of a compound word). No one should have been surprised that it led to a brief fad of students saying unbelievfuckingable just to be difficult. Dr. Fiveash also spoke fondly of the emphatic possibilities of reduplication: unbe . . . believable, which I have never actually used in conversation no matter my level of incredulity, but I appreciate having been told in my junior year of high school that I could.

Comments

[jinian.livejournal.com]

English uses infixes so rarely that I am happy to see them under any circumstances, and that Wikipedia article's support of a-whole-nother under my own theory pleases me very much. (I mean, the alternative theory is "it's just wrong," so just about any linguist is going to be better than that, but negativity's what I see mostly.)

[sovay]

and that Wikipedia article's support of a-whole-nother under my own theory pleases me very much.

Wikipedia is definitely a step up from "Because I said so!"

I wish we had more tmesis in English. I have always liked it.