English verbs from Latin supine stems

(sidenote) The last few paragraphs have been rewritten with hopefully more clarity. (2024-08-22 update)

A while ago I was thinking about how English has the verb interrupt. This is formed on the supine stem interrupt- of the Latin etymon interrumpere “to break apart”, not the present stem interrump- (whence e.g. Italian interrómpere, Spanish interrumpir, French interrompre, etc., and also Dutch interrumperen); but English could well have taken the present stem too and have *interrump prevail.

For a while now my mind has been stuck on this possibility. Small would-bes like this are always fun to think about. But also importantly, it reminds of the fact that, although continuing the present stem seems to make more sense, it’s actually completely commonplace for English latinate verbs to continue Latin supine stems.

Some of these verbs ultimately rest on Latin-internal derivations formed on the supine stem, like -āre–iteratives/intensives, the -tor–nomina agentium, and the -tiō– and -tus–nouns (and are therefore technically not directly from Latin supine stems, you could argue). Some examples:

And then there seem to still be early (14–17 c.) borrowed verbs after Latin supine stems, for which corresponding -āre–formations in Latin are not attested (or attested very poorly), and for which a derivation from e.g. a -tiō or -tus noun is possible but cannot be stated certainly. Instead the clearest source for a lot of these verbs seems to be related adjectives with past participial meanings:

And many more. The adjectives obviously come formally and semantically from the Latin perfect passive participles. The OED offers an account for these verbs at the -ate SUFFIX3 entry, in which they consider them to be built analogously after homonymous adjective–verb pairs like dry (adj.) vs. dry (v.). I’ll quote the whole thing below.

In Old English, verbs had been regularly formed on adjectives, as hwít hwítian, wearm wearmian, bysig bysgian, drýge drýgan, etc. With the loss of the inflections, these verbs became, by the 15th cent., identical in form with the adjectives, e.g. to white, warm, busy, dry, empty, dirty, etc.

In Latin, verbs were also freely formed on adjectives, as siccus siccāre, clārus clārāre, līber līberāre, sacer sacrāre. This prevailed still more extensively in French, e.g. sec sècher, clair clairer, content contenter, confus confuser, etc. Thence also English received many verbs, which by the 15th cent. were identical in form with their adjectives, e.g. to clear, humble, manifest, confuse, etc.

On these analogies English adjectives formed from Latin past participles began generally, in the 16th cent., to yield verbs of identical form, e.g. adjective direct, verb to direct; adjective separate, verb to separate; adjective aggravate, verb to aggravate: precisely analogous to adjective busy, verb to busy; adjective content, verb to content.

These verbs, though formed immediately from participial adjectives already in English, answered in form to the past participles of Latin verbs of the same meaning. It was thus natural to associate them directly with these Latin verbs, and to view them as their regular English representatives.

This once done, it became the recognized method of englishing a Latin verb, to take the participial stem of the Latin as the present stem of the English; so that English verbs were now formed on Latin past participles by mere analogy, and without the intervention of a participial adjective. In accordance with this, fascinate, concatenate, asseverate, venerate, and hundreds of others, have been formed directly on the participial stems of Latin fascināre, concatēnāre, assevērāre, venerāri, etc., without having been preceded by a cognate adjective. In the case of many words introduced in the 16th cent., evidence is wanting to show whether the verb was preceded by, or contemporaneous with, the participial adjective in ‑ate.

These English verbs in ‑ate correspond generally to French verbs in ‑er (:—Latin ‑āre), as English separate, create, French séparer, créer: this in its turn gave an analogy for the formation of English verbs from French; as French isoler (< Italian isolare:—Latin insulāre), English isolate; French féliciter, English felicitate.

Latin verbs in ‑āre might, analogically, have been formed on many words, on which they were not actually formed; wherever such a verb might have existed, a French verb in ‑er, and an English verb in ‑ate, are liable to be formed. Thus nōbilitas gave in Latin nōbilitāre, the English representative of which is nobilitate; fēlīcitas, which might have given fēlīcitāre, has given French féliciter and English felicitate; and capācitas, which might have given Latin capācitāre and French capaciter, has actually given English capacitate. Hence numerous modern verbs, as differentiate, substantiate, vaccinate; including many formed on modern or foreign words, as adipocerate, assassinate, camphorate, methylate.

(It is possible that the analogy of native verbs in ‑t, with the past participle identical in form with the infinitive, as set, hit, put, cut, contributed also to the establishment of verbs like direct, separat(e, identical with their past participles.)

I think this account must be at least partly correct, but I’m not sure if I agree with all of it. In reference to the last paragraph of the quote, it should be noted that early verbs (or at least a lot of them) in this class were originally normally treated as irregular verbs with preterite and past participial forms identical with the simple present (examples taken from OED):

OED suggests (if I read it correctly) that the learned adjectives were borrowed as morphological simplexes, and the verbs were formed through zero-derivation, and then the zero-inflected preterits and past participles were formed on the analogy of verbs like set and hit. This seems contrived to me. I think the early English writers must have well understood the relevant learned adjectives as participles, not as morphologically simplex adjectives, and these forms, viewed as participles, were then generalized to fill up their individual verbal paradigms (here perhaps indeed through the analogy mentioned by OED). In other words, at least for some of these words, and at least partly, it was not that an adjective gave rise to a verb through zero-derivation; it was that a verbal form gave rise to other verbal forms through syncretism.

No matter the route of formation, these early items provided patterns in which later latinate verbs would follow. So corrupt might have served as a model for erupt (from 17 c., v.) and disrupt (from 17 c., primarily v., adj. use not until 18 c.), for example. A whole class of English latinate verbs ending in -ate are hence spawned. And, as OED points out, this could become more general so that “it became the recognized method of englishing a Latin verb to take the participial stem of the Latin as the present stem of the English”.

I have nothing more to say for now. This was something that had been on and off on my mind, and with this written I’ll probably finally stop thinking about it for a while. I wish you a happy life. See you later.

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