It’s basicer than you thought
Ok, nothing is more basic than the word "basic", right?
But why can’t you say "basic-er?"
The rule I learned from my highschool English class — mind you, that was 20 years ago in China — was that 1-syllable adjectives must take "-er", and 2-syllable adj. can take either "-er" or "more X"; anything above that the only option is "more X". I have since learned to give up many prescrive rules I learned, but this one has been serving me well. Until when I start to think about it, that is.
My first thought was that this msut be a phonological thing, but then, I can be "sicker" than you are, and my skin can be "thicker" than yours. Hmm… So I looked up dictionary.com:
| Roget’s New Millennium™ Thesaurus - Cite This Source | |
| Main Entry: | basic |
| Part of Speech: | adjective |
| Definition: | elementary |
| Synonyms: | basal, capital, central, chief, elemental, essential, indispensable, inherent, intrinsic, key, main, necessary, primary, primitive, principal, radical, substratal, underlying, vital |
| Antonyms: | additional, extra, inessential, nonessential, peripheral, secondary, superfluous |
| Source: | Roget’s New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1) Copyright © 2007 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved. |
Notice that none of the 1- or 2-syllable adjectives can have the -er form for comparative. I don’t think you can say
- * I play a key-er role than you do.
- * The kidney is vital-er than the heart.
- * His position is central-er than mine.
But looking at the second cluster of synonyms:
| Main Entry: | bare |
| Part of Speech: | adjective 3 |
| Definition: | simple |
| Synonyms: | austere, bald, basic, blunt, chaste, cold, essential, hard, literal, meager, mere, modest, scant, severe, sheer, simple, spare, stark, unadorned, unembellished, unornamented |
Sure enough, you can have be bald-er, blunt-er, cold-er, so on and so forth. This implies that whatever rule that is blocking "basic-er", it is not about semantics or "abstractness", because at lease one prominent sense of "basic" belongs to the "-er" group.
Why oh why is it, that you can say it’s simpler but not it’s basic-er?
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:25 am e
It’s coz the second syllable of a two-sylable word suffixed with ‘-er’ nearly always has to be open, i.e. codaless — the final /k/ in ‘basic’ disqualifies it. (The second syllable nearly always has to be unstressed, too.) That’s why ’shallow’ forms ’shallower’ but ‘active’ doesn’t form ‘*activer’; ditto for ‘naked/*nakeder’… One major exception to both rules is ‘polite’, you can, for some reason, be ‘politer’….
May 25th, 2007 at 1:28 pm e
Or stupider
May 25th, 2007 at 1:55 pm e
Heidi — this sounds good, but it still leaves me with two questions:
1. What about *key-er, and *main-er? Is there a phonological constraint on 1-syllable words? Or is it semantic?
2. It can’t be all about phonology — for nouns like “controller” and others “-er”s. Is the constraint specific for adjectives?
English! Sigh.