Talk:Tmesis

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About "a whole nother" vs "another": Why do you say it's epenthesis? It seems to me that "a whole nother" is a reanalysis of "another" as "a nother", where "nother" is a free morpheme.

I'm not sure if it really qualifies as tmesis, then, but I think epenthesis is way off. Thoughts?

Quincy 00:33, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm with you that "a-whole-nother" is probably actually "a whole 'nother" and thus an example of aphesis, not tmesis or epenthesis.
Similarly, I think "what-place-soever" ought be removed. Googling yields mostly archaic results, e.g. KJV quotes, from a time when "soever" was a common word on its own, used "with generalizing or emphatic force". Take this 1580 example given in the OED, "The feare of what punishment temporal soever". More likely "what" and "soever" are meant as entirely separate words, not as one word with "punishment temporal" inserted in the middle, eh?
I'll go ahead and remove both these examples if no one objects. The article has enough others to survive without these.--Severinus 05:40, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
I went ahead and rem'd those examples since no one seemed to object... -- Severinus 07:12, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] em...

Shouldnt this article mention at least one swear-related Tmesis. Its by far the more common example of this phenomenon than the weak examples here

Why in hell would anyone begin a word with tm? lysdexia 07:05, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

or more precisely, why would anyone transliterate greek using tm, since i doubt they pronounced it that way... though they did have some weird prefixes that only work mid-word, like ptero... diptera is easy to pronounce, but pterodactyl is not. ^^'

^^^^^

While there is some controversy surrounding how ancient greeks actually pronounced stuff, for the specific letters Τ and Μ, all scholars unanimously agree that they were pronounced exactly as transliterated in the above example. For what it's worth, they are pronounced the same way even today by native speakers of the language who have no problem pronouncing the word τμησις. Clearly, what is easy to pronounce and what isn't, in terms of sequences of phthongs (try pronouncing that! :P), whether in the middle of a word or at the start, depends on what your native language is. In fact we could have been spared of all those "scientific" pronounciations of classical greek (as the Erasmian pronunciation) if those researchers had been careful not to extrapolate stuff from what seems natural in the contect of their own native languages.

144.32.81.175 16:35, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Scunthorpe? ed g2s • talk 02:29, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Greek words starting with two consonants (ps-, pt- and others) are usually zero grades - see Indo-European ablaut. As such they make perfect philological sense, and yes, they were pronounced that way. --Doric Loon (talk) 18:57, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] how heinous e'er

I removed

* "how heinous e'er it be" (Shakespeare's tmesis of "however" in Richard II)

since

  • the construction makes grammatical sense without assuming it is derived from "however", and
  • it is in complete contrast to all the other examples, and needs to be discussed as an exception to the pattern they evidence, if it is in fact itself an example.

WS's intent seems to be "no matter how heinous it turns out to be", and "ever" has the force of "always" and thus "anyway". In fact, we should cite evidence that English of that vintage treated "however" as a single word, rather than having "how ever", "what ever", "when ever", etc. as two word phrases that had not yet fused into our corresponding familiar single words.

It may be an example, but there is more work needed to show that, and still more to fit it into the article in that case.
--Jerzy•t 03:57, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Adjustment of Offensive Language

>Shouldnt this article mention at least one swear-related Tmesis. Its by far the more common >example of this phenomenon than the weak examples here

The point is about offending and thereby hurting others with imprudent use of language, not how common insults are infixed or how strong or weak it may be. Keep in mind that this page is meant for a general readers; that includes children. Apeman 18:51, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

No, this page is meant for people who have read and understand Wikipedia's disclaimers, notably Wikipedia:Content disclaimer. It's one thing to remove needless profanity, but when the profanity is essential to the article (as it is in this case — expletive infixation is a very prominent form of tmesis in English), it remains. —RuakhTALK 20:30, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Ruakh. Wikipedia is not censored, nor should it be. --Cromwellt|talk|contribs 15:16, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
I wholeheartedly agree that this article shouldn't be censored, particularly considering that modern-day tmesis is so often swearing-oriented, but I do think it's unnecessary and gratuitious to have to "X-fuckin'-X" examples when neither one of them is a cited example from literature. I would recommend deleting "Congratu-fuckin'-lations", another expletive infixation, as it doesn't seem to serve any purpose. SRBAndrews 10:30, 18 Feb 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.114.144.229 (talk)

[edit] Sources

This article has been tagged as not citing sources for a while (since August 2006), but now there are three sources cited. They may not all be reliable, but they are citations. I'd say we can remove or change the tag. --Cromwellt|talk|contribs 15:16, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] incorrect application

All my searches have found that tmesis is restricted to the insertion of a word or words between the elements of a compound word. It does not apply to cases where an infix is inserted between the syllables of a word that is not a compound. --EncycloPetey 18:45, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Split infinitive

Someon has added to our article on the split infinitive a note that the Latin infinitive could be split by tmesis. If that is true, it would be really useful to have an example of it here - in fact we could do with a whole section on Latin, if the phenomenon really does occur. --Doric Loon (talk) 18:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)