Language changes and evolves both subtly and quite obviously; one of the more obvious ways is through clipping, where shorter words are cut out of longer words.
Believe me, you don’t become alanguage translationprofessional by chance. While some students and young adults might drift into a field through inertia or because of a family legacy – or simply having no idea what to do with their lives and needing a job – those of us intranslationservices are here because of one primary reason: We have a love for language. From a young age we were fascinated by the way people could communicate just by making different noises with their mouths and throats, and how the same noises, arranged in different ways, formed wholly different languages.
That also means we’re all familiar with the basic ideas of language studies, whether we’re experts in the field or just interested amateurs who use our off-hours to read about language and how it’s formed. This means we’re all either the best person to wind up sitting next to at a dinner party, or the worst, depending on your own interests. Recently, for example, I’ve been reading about the fascinating process of Clipping in language evolution.
The Clipped Word
What is “clipping”? It’s actually something you’re likely very familiar with. It’s the simple process of forming a new word by clipping off part of an existing word. An easy example is the wordexam, which of course comes from the longer wordexamination. The letters “ination” have simply been clipped off, forming a new word that shares the definition and context of the older word.
Clipping is, of course, a reductive process that shortens words and thus shortens the effort involved in speech and writing, albeit by a tiny increment. However, you can imagine how this process can slowly reduce the time spent expressing thoughts, paring language down to shorter and shorter words. Anyone who has read Shakespeare might see how language has sped up and become much faster and moreclippedover the centuries.
Clipping also reduces formality.Examinationis a word that would be used by a teacher or in official language on a school’s policy page, whileexamis the word all the students would use.
Types of Clipping
- Clipping comes in four basic varieties:
- Back Clipping: As we’ve seen inexamandexamination, back clipping is when the back half of a word is deleted. Another example ismemo, the back-clipped form ofmemorandum.
- Fore Clipping: The process can be reversed, deleting the beginning of a word, as invarsity, which is a fore-clipped (and slightly mutated) version ofuniversity.
- Mid Clipping: More rare is when the beginning and end of a word is clipped to form a new word. A good example isflu, clipped out ofinfluenza.
- Compound Clipping: Much rarer, this involves clipping more than one word to form a new word. The best example I can think of iscablegram, taken from the phrasecable telegram.
If you found this fascinating, you might have a future as a translator!
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Liraz Postan
Liraz is an International SEO and Content Expert with over 13 years of experience.
