# the suffix -en



## huojing1028

SomeEnglish verbs are formed by attaching the suffix -en to an adjectival base, asin (ia):
(i) a. black#en, bright#en, broad#en,damp#en, dark#en, deep#en, worse#en.
b. *blue#en, *cold#en, *cool#en, *dumb#en,*tall#en, *remote#en, *green#en.
 What do the forms in (ia) have incommon that is not shared by the forms in (ib) that might explain why thelatter are ungrammatical?


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## boozer

Welcome to the forum.

Each language offers a set of word-formation tools, among which are suffixes like -en to form verbs from adjectives in English. Which does not mean you can automatically stick this suffix to any adjective and make a verb. In fact, you can, but much of the time you'll be getting non-entities, i.e. non-existent words. Now, the answer you are looking for: there is nothing in the words that makes it impossible to add the suffix -en. However, if a word does not exist, this means it was never needed or there are other words that are used to mean the same. You can try and ask specific questions with the group-b words in context and each time you will be told that you should not say, for instance, "bluen" but "make blue"...


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## huojing1028

boozer said:


> Welcome to the forum.
> 
> Each language offers a set of word-formation tools, among which are suffixes like -en to form verbs from adjectives in English. Which does not mean you can automatically stick this suffix to any adjective and make a verb. In fact, you can, but much of the time you'll be getting non-entities, i.e. non-existent words. Now, the answer you are looking for: there is nothing in the words that makes it impossible to add the suffix -en. However, if a word does not exist, this means it was never needed or there are other words that are used to mean the same. You can try and ask specific questions with the group-b words in context and each time you will be told that you should not say, for instance, "bluen" but "make blue"...



Thanks for your reply. Actually, it's my assignment. I want to know the reason why some adjectives cannot add the suffix -en and which kind of adjectives cannot add it,just like you said the instance "make blue" not 'bluen'.


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## boozer

That surely is not an assignment I would ever have given to anyone...


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## huojing1028

but it is really my assignment...who knows what the teacher thinks...


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## PaulQ

It might help to look at Middle English verbs; these had the ending #en. Thus a noun/adjective could be made into a verb by adding #en (This is a general observation rather than a fast rule and obviously, as today, not all noun/adjective-to-verb transitions work like that.)


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## huojing1028

Thank you very much. could you give me the specific explanation concerning the question?


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## CapnPrep

huojing1028 said:


> Actually, it's my assignment.


 Normally, you are supposed to attempt the assignment yourself before asking us for the answer, but I don't think any one around here (or anywhere) is going to be able to give the answer anyway. The way the question is phrased ("might explain") suggests to me that they're not expecting you to find the solution. Maybe they just want you to think about the words and talk about them and feel frustrated.

The following thread will give you some idea of how unfair this assignment is:
Causative -en (-yan) suffix ending in historical English

You might also want to read this external link for some historical background:
-en verbs from adjectives


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## lucas-sp

Is it just "because the later set didn't get used enough to be codified as honest-to-gosh words"?

There's some controversy in that other thread about whether the -en rule is still productive, that is, if it's still being used to make new words. There's at least one example I can think of ("ensmallen") where the -en rule has made a new word in the past decade. 

For some of the words you list, there are well-known verb forms ("to cool," "to dumb") that would make the application of the -en form unnecessary. But there's no reason why any of them ("greenen," "colden") shouldn't have become words, or shouldn't become words in the future for that matter - an English speaker would know what you wanted if you asked her to "colden the custard before putting it into the ice-cream maker." Isn't it just a historical accident that certain forms got to be popular enough to become words?


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## exgerman

Actually, the answer is in the post by Alxmrhpi that CapnPrep linked to:



> The suffix -en is subject to this phonological constraint: it can only combine with a monosyllabic base that ends in an obstruent. Hence it can be added to _white_, which is both monosyllabic and ends in an obstruent, but not to _abstract_, which has two syllables, or to _blue_, which does not end in an obstruent.



So the adjective must

1. be monosyllabic, and

2. end in an obstruent consonant.

I agree with everybody else that this is a question that requires a lot of linguistic sophistication. I could see this as an  exercise in a linguistics course, but not in an English language course.

EDIT: cold fails this rule, so there may be an additional constraint.


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## lucas-sp

"Colden"? "Hotten"? "Rapten"?


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## boozer

Quite frankly, I had not read Alxmrphi's post and if I ever studied this at university I surely had forgotten it. However, I did try to think along those lines, trying to find some phonetic reason why the second group could not work. In fact, "colden" sounded so plausible to me, that I even checked a dictionary to make certain it did not exist.


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## CapnPrep

exgerman said:


> EDIT: cold fails this rule, so there may be an additional constraint.


Indeed. I believe the additional constraint is: "The resulting form must be an English word." 



boozer said:


> In fact, "colden" sounded so plausible to me,  that I even checked a dictionary to make certain it did not exist.


_Colden_ does exist, in the sense that it's in the dictionary. But then, so are _shoa*l*en_ and _ni*gh*en_, which should not exist, according to the obstruent rule. (The application of the rule is debatable in the case of _ni*gh*en_, but then also in the case of _dum*b*en_.)


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## boozer

"Embolden" fails the rule as well...


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## lucas-sp

And that additional constraint kindof trumps all the others, right?

Even if Alxmrphi's "rule" is correct, it cannot predict all of the words formed by adding -en that will (have) become codified or popularized. I think it just goes back to "if enough people use it, it's a word." So perhaps it's no surprise "worsen" (very useful) becomes a word and "tersen" (limited applicability) doesn't. The "rule" might have more to do with which words are easier to form by adding -en - it's certainly easier to say "tauten" than "bluen" or "distanten." In that way, Alxmrphi's rule (which claims to be prescriptive) might actually just be descriptive.

Boozer - good catch! Also, what about crazy words like "enlighten"? If "lighten" had already been verbalized, why does it get that "en-" prefix too?


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## boozer

lucas-sp said:


> Also, what about crazy words like "enlighten"? If "lighten" had already been verbalized, why does it get that "en-" prefix too?


Excellent question! Been asking it to myself too. PS. In fact, huojing, please tell us what your teacher wanted to teach you after discussing this in class. I'm dying to find out


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## PaulQ

light -> to lighten -> to enlighten = to shed light upon -> to  enenlighten to shed light upon and make a shade or two paler


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## huojing1028

I think he just want us to give an generalization to the use of -en.


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## berndf

This thread has been given a new life in a different forum.

@huojing: How did your teacher respond?


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