1144: Historical Comparatives Jan 26, 2018

There are certain unspoken rules, so to speak, concerning when an adjective in the comparative or superlative form will take '-er' and '-est', or 'more...' and 'most' respectively. It is why we get 'prettier' and 'prettiest' but not 'beautiful-er' or 'beautiful-est' which you can read more about in a previous post. There is somewhat of a discrepancy with the word 'fun', as 'funner' and especially 'funnest' is acceptable to some, particularly Americans, but not other, notably Brits, though despite this, generally the phonetic conventions are observed. When you see an adjective, then, with '-er' and '-est', it is probably safe to assume that there is a form without these suffixes, which is called a perfect adjective. With the words 'latter' and 'last', it might not be apparent whether they are related, and if so, what the perfect form would be, but a look into their etymologies reveals how they came to be the way they are. In fact, historically, these are a comparative and superlative form; 'latter' now means 'towards the end' or often 'the second of two', but in Old English 'lætra' just meant, more broadly ‘slower’, and was the comparative of 'læt' meaning 'slow' or, as you can maybe guess, 'late'. 'Last' on the other hand, while it is less direct in its relation to 'late' comes from the Old English 'latost', which was an adverb that has now gained an additional adjectival form, and is indeed related to 'late'. This is not to say that 'latter' and 'last' are the comparative and superlative form of 'late', given also that English has 'later' and 'latest', but clues from the meaning of a word and more importantly the way it looks can lead to certain insights.
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