In linguistics, there are three kinds of affix (Indonesian: imbuhan). They are prefixes (beginnings), infixes (middle), and suffixes (endings). In English, however, there are only two of them, i.e. prefixes and suffixes.
In this word formation series, we are about to discuss five topics divided into five posts:
This post brings us to the first theme, i.e. verb formation. As we all know, verb formation is part of fundamental knowledge in English. Without having ample understanding (and plenty of practice) on this, our writing composition will be as awful, full of errors and boring as it can be. It will naturally drive your readers away from your blog, your posts, your articles or simply anything we present them, not to mention how hard they ought to understand our erronous writing. In short, reading a piece of writing full of errors is a n ultimate torture for readers.
Straight to the point, we can add endings/ suffixes -ize and -ify to many (but NOT all) nouns and adjectives to form verbs. Here are the examples:
- western (adjective) --- westernize (verb)
- legal (adjective) --- legalize (verb)
- modern (adjective) --- modernize (verb)
- popular (adjective) --- popularize (verb)
- beauty (noun) --- beautify (verb)
- liquid (noun) --- liquefy (verb)
- pure (adjective) --- purify (verb)
- simple (adjective) --- simplify (verb)
- glory (noun) --- glorify (verb)
- humid (adjective) --- humidify (verb)
As stated before, we cannot add these endings to all nouns and adjectives. There are some exceptions that we have got to be beware of.
- 'rebel (noun) ---
rebelify/rebelizere'bel (verb) - keeper (noun) ---
keepify/keepizekeep (verb) - clean (adjective) ---
cleanify/cleanizeclean (verb) - annoying (adjective) ---
annoyingify/annoyingizeannoy (verb)
There are actually hundreds of exceptional cases other than what is presented above but NEVER ask your teacher, lecturers, or anybody if there is any special pattern to determine which word can be added with -ify and -ize and which word cannot. There is no specific pattern in this formation because everything is based on arbitrariness (=unpredictability), meaning that it is up to the convention of society that owns the language (in this case, English). If the society (and the authority, sometimes) thinks a word is acceptable and thus becomes widely used, then it is likely for a word to be considered right. That is it cannot be stressed enough that learning a language is much different from learning natural sciences like physics, mechanics, chemistry, and so forth.
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