THE

HISTORY OF ATLANTIS
CHAPTER 1
A HISTORY OF ATLANTIS must differ from all the other histories, for the
fundamental reason that is seeks to record the chronicles of a country the soil of
which is no longer available for examination to the archaeologist. If, through some
cataclysm of nature, the Italian peninsula had been submerged in the green waters
of the Mediterranean at a period subsequent to the fall od Rome, we would still
have been in possession of much documentary evidence concerning the growth and
ascent of the Roman Empire. At the same time, the soil upon which that empire
flourished, the ponderable remains of its civilization and its architecture, would
have been for ever lost to us save as regards their colonial manifestations. We
should, in a great measure, have been forced to glean our ideas of Latin pre-
eminence from those institutions which it founded in other lands, and from those
traditions of it which remained at the era of its disappearance among the unlettered
nations surrounding it.
But great as would be the difficulties attending such an enterprise, these would,
indeed, be negligible when compared with the task of groping through the mists of
the ages in quest of the outlines of chronicle and event which tell of a civilization
plunged into the
 Chapter 1
Introduction

1.1
WHY STUDY WORDS?
Imagine a life without words! Trappist monks opt for it. But most of us would not
give up words for anything. Every day we utter thousands and thousands of words.
Communicating our joys, fears, opinions, fantasies, wishes, requests, demands,
feelings and the occasional threat or insult is a very important aspect of being
human. The air is always thick with our verbal emissions. There are so many things
we want to tell the world. Some of them are important, some of them are not. But
we talk anyway-even when we know that what we are saying is totally
unimportant. We love chitchat and find silent encounters awkward, or even
oppressive. A life without words would be a horrendous privation.
It is a cliché to say that words and language are probably humankind's most
valuable single possession. It is language that sets us apart from our biologically
close relatives, the great primates. (I would imagine that many a chimp or gorilla
would give an arm and a leg for a few words-but we will probably never know
because they cannot tell us.) Yet, surprisingly, most of us take words (and more
generally language) for granted. We cannot discuss words with anything like the
competence with which we can discuss fashion, films or football.
We should not take words for granted. They are too important. This book is
intended to make explicit some of the things that we know subconsciously about
words. It is a linguistic introduction to the nature and structure of English words. It
addresses the question 'what sorts of things do people need to know about English
words in order to use them in speech?' It is intended to increase the degree of
sophistication with which you think about words. It is designed to give you a
theoretical grasp of English word-formation, the sources of English vocabulary and
the way in which we store and retrieve words from the mind.
I hope a desirable side effect of working through English Words will be the
enrichment of your vocabulary. This book will help to increase, in a very practical
way, your awareness of the relationship between words. You will be equipped with
the tools you need to work out the meanings of unfamiliar words and to see in a
new light the underlying structural patterns in many familiar words which you
have not previously stopped to think about analytically.
For the student of language, words are a very rewarding object of study. An
understanding of the nature of words provides us with a key that opens the door to
an understanding of important aspects of the nature of language in general. Words
give us a panoramic view of the entire field of linguistics because they impinge on
every aspect of language structure. This book stresses the ramifications of the fact
that words are complex and multi-faceted entities whose structure and use interacts
with the other modules of the grammar
[1.2]
INTRO
a. We put all the big _____ on the table.
b. We put all the big splets on the table.
The study of word-formation and word-structure is called MORPHOLOGY.
Morphological theory provides a general theory of word-structure in all the
languages of the world. Its task is to characterise the kinds of things that speakers
need to know about the structure of the words of their language in order to be able
to use them to produce and to understand speech.
We will see that in order to use language, speakers need to have two types of
morphological knowledge. First, they need to be able to analyse existing words
(e.g. they must be able to tell that frogs contains frog plus -s for plural). Usually, if
we know the meanings of the elements that a word contains, it is possible to
determine the meaning of the entire word once we have worked out how the
various elements relate to each other. For instance, if we examine a word like
nutcracker we find that it is made up of two words, namely the noun nut and the
noun cracker. Furthermore, we see that the latter word, cracker is divisible into the
verb crack and another meaningful element -er (roughly meaning an instrument
used to do X'), which, however, is not a word in its own right. Numerous other
words are formed using this pattern of combining words (and smaller meaningful
elements) as seen in [1.3]:
[1.3]
[tea]Noun [strain-er]] Noun
[lawn]Noun [mow-er]] Noun
[can]Noun [open-er]] Noun
Given the frame [[___] Noun-[____er]] Noun, we can fill in different words
with the appropriate properties and get another compound word (i.e. a word
containing at least two words). Try this frame out yourself. Find two more similar
examples of compound words formed using this pattern.
Second, speakers need to be able to work out the meanings of novel words
constructed using the word- building elements and standard word-construction
rules of the language. Probably we all know and use more words than are listed in
dictionaries. We can construct and analyse the structure and meaning of old words
as well as new ones. So, although many words must be listed in the dictionary and
memorised, listing every word in the dictionary is not necessary. If a word is
formed following general principles, it may be more efficient to reconstitute it
from its constituent elements as the need arises rather than permanently commit it
to memory. When people make up new words using existing words and
wordforming elements, we understand them with ease-providing we know what the
elements they use to form those words mean and providing the word-forming rules
that they employ are familiar. This ability is one of the things explored in
morphological investigations.
In an average week, we are likely to encounter a couple of unfamiliar words.
We might reach for a dictionary and look them up. Some of them may be listed but
others might be too new or too ephemeral to have found their way into any
dictionary. In such an event, we rely on our morphological knowledge to tease out
their meanings. If you heard someone describe their partner as 'a great list maker
and a ticker-off, you would instantly know what sort of person the partner was-
although you almost certainly have never encountered the word ticker-off before.
And it is certainly not listed in any dictionary. The -er ending here has CLOSE
ECONCOUNTER OF A MORPHEMIC KIND
[3.2]
 childish hopeless sooner mended elephants re-boil unsafe ex-wife
You would have to give a different answer. You would need to tell your
interrogator, who by now would be getting increasingly bewildered, that the words
in [3.2] can be divided into smaller units of meaning as shown in [3.3]:
[3.3]
child-ish hope-less soon-er mend-ed elephant-s re-boil un-safe ex-wife
The part of the word that is not italicised can function as an independent
word in the grammar. Indeed, each of the nonitalicised chunks is a word (i.e.
vocabulary item) that is listed as such in the dictionary. By contrast, the italicised
bits, though meaningful (and their meanings can be indicated as shown in [3.4]).
cannot function on their own in the grammar.
[3.4]
-ish
*having the (objectionable) qualities of
-less
'without X
-er
'more X'
-ed
'past
-S
'plural
re
'again'
un
'not X'
 child-ish= 'having the qualities of a child' hopeless= 'without hope"
sooner= 'more soon
mended= "mend in the past
elephants="more than one elephant'
re-boil= 'boil again'
unsagfe= 'not safe'
ex
*former
ex-wife- former wife'
What we have done to the words in [3.4] can be done to thousands of other
words in English. They can be decomposed into smaller units of meaning (e.g. re-
*again') or grammatical function (e.g. -ed 'past').
The term MORPHEME is used to refer to the smallest unit that has meaning
or serves a grammatical function in a language. Morphemes are the atoms with
which words are built. It is not possible to find sub- morphemic units that are
themselves meaningful or have a grammatical function. Thus, given -less or un-, it
would make no sense to try to assign some identifiable meaning to any part of
these forms. Of course, it is possible to isolate the individual sounds 1-1-s/ or / -n/,
but those sounds in themselves do not mean anything.
We have now established that words are made up of morphemes. But how
do we recognise a morpheme when we see one? Our definition of the morpheme as
the smallest unit of meaning (or grammatical function) will be the guiding
principle. Any chunk of a word with a particular meaning will be said to represent
a morpheme. That is how we proceeded in [3.3] and [3.4] above.
Morphemes tend to have a fairly stable meaning which they bring to any
word in which they appear. If we take re- and un-, for example, they mean 'again'
and 'not' respectively-not just in the words we have listed above, but also in
thousands of other words. Usually morphemes are used again and again to form
different words. Thus re- meaning 're-do whatever the verb means' can be attached
before most verbs to yield a new word with a predictable meaning (e.g. re-run, re-
take, re-build etc.). In like manner, un- meaning 'not X' (where X stands for
whatever the adjective means) can be attached to various adjectives (e.g. un-real,
un-clean, un-happy etc.) to yield a new word with a predictable negative meaning.