(h/t +Kee Hinckley)
Reshared post from +Yonatan Zunger
Here's something interesting. Syntactic particles like "the" and suffixes like "-s" often form by a process called grammaticalization, where a content word gradually acquires a purely grammatical meaning. For example, "the" was originally the demonstrative "that."* Or for those of you who speak French, you may note that verbs are negated with "ne [verb] pas," or simply "[verb] pas" in spoken French. Originally, it was "ne [verb]," similar to how negation works in other Romance languages; in the 16th century or so, it became common to add emphatics to it — "je ne mange gout," "I won't eat a bite," "je ne prends rien," "I'm not taking anything," and "je ne marche pas," "I'm not going a step." First it became common (and much-derided by the older generation) speech to always put in these emphatics; then "pas" ("a step") started to be more commonly used as the default one, when it wasn't obvious which one to use; then it became used almost universally, when people weren't feeling creative about what to say; and ultimately, "ne… pas" became the standard way to negate something, with "ne [verb]" becoming seen as outright incorrect French. (And now the "ne" is gradually being dropped in speech!)
"Ish," however, is one of the few words which has moved in the opposite direction: it's moving from being a piece of grammar (a suffix, in this case) to being a word in its own right. "Ish" is what's called a productive suffix: you can append it to a wide range of words and people will know what it means. (Other productive suffixes in English are "-ed" (past tense), "-s" (plural), or "-ist" (adherent of). Contrast this with "-red" (the condition of, as in "hatred"): you can't append this to a general word and have people have any idea of what you're talking about, but there are still various words which were kept using it from back in the day when it was a productive suffix)
In fact, "ish" was so productive that it started to decouple from the word. First, it could apply to not just a single word, but to a phrase ("Give me something rum-and-cokeish"), which slowly turned it from a suffix into a small grammatical word of its own. And then, you started to see that in some circumstances it became possible to eliminate the content word altogether: for example, if someone asks "Did the movie have a happy ending?," you could say "Yeah, happy-ish," but increasingly you could just drop the repeated content word (which English likes to do: if someone asks "Did you walk there?" you're much more likely to say "I did" than "I walked") and say "Yeah, -ish."
"Ish" slowly becomes an independent word, roughly equivalent to the phrase "more or less." Unlike the few other words which have been pulled off from grammar in this way (the crossword puzzle builder's perennial favorite "ism," "a system of beliefs," being a classical example) this one isn't a noun: you can't have an ish, happyish and saddish are not ishes. This one seems to have the structure of an adverb, all the more interesting because most new adverbs in English are formed via the (productive!) suffix "-ly" attached to an adjective. Adverbs which are also used as adjectives on their own, without suffixes, are more often holdovers from older words in English, like "quick."
So here's an interesting new formation in our language.
Or at least, interesting-ish.
h/t +Laura Gibbs.
* Yes, historical linguists: I am oversimplifying here. I know.
Ish: How A Suffix Became A Word
The canonical use of -ish is as a suffix meaning “approximately,” as in bluish, tallish, sixish, or even hungry-ish. This is the definition—the only definition—that you’ll find in Merriam-Webster, which notes that -ish derives from the Old English -isc, of Germanic origin, which in turn is related to similar such suffixes…