29 July 2012
on language evolution:
as recently as 10-15 years ago, i was taught that "disrespect" was a noun, but not a verb. you could not disrespect someone, but you could show disrespect to someone. even so, everybody used "disrespect" as a verb--"yo, why you disrespectin' me?"--and now, "disrespect" is widely accepted as a verb, and hardly ever used as a noun. i just think it's interesting that i can measure syntactic change in my native language in such a short period of time.
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2 comments:
That's pretty interesting to me since I'd never heard that rule until reading this. It doesn't make sense, linguistically. When you look at other verbs with the same prefix, the result is still a verb: like/dislike, trust/distrust. This is assuming that the original "respect" is a verb, of course. When the original respect is a noun, then it does make sense to compare it to something like taste/distaste ("to have X for something"). I think it makes sense both ways. Is respect something that exists outside of the performance of respect? If it is, then it can be quantified and is a noun. But I also look at respect as I do the word "honor". Honor is both something that can be possessed and something that can be done. Perhaps the problem arises because there is no direct action that equates to disrespect, like there is when you throw something: You can only show signs of disrespect because it cannot be directly observed? Anyway, I like to ramble about semantics lol, and I hope you have as much fun with this as I am having.
And yes, I now realize that I contradicted myself in that comment trying to figure the whole thing out. Oops
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