1177: Word Families Feb 28, 2018

People may be fairly familiar with the concept of a language-family, as it shows many of the relationships that languages have to each other. Nevertheless, it is not the only type of family that linguists are concerned with, such as also word-families. Much like how Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian etc. are all considered Romance languages becasue they derive from Latin, many words for relating to 'nose' now, including 'snout', 'snot', 'sneeze' etc comes from the Proto-Indo-European 'snu', making it a word family. These do not have to come from extinct sources however, and in Kalaallisut for example, there are many words that come from 'oqaq' ('tongue') that all still relate to it somehow, such as 'oqarpoq' ('says'), 'oqaaseq' ('word'), 'oqaluppoq' ('speaks'), 'oqaasilerisoq' ('linguist'), as well as some more complicated ones, such as 'oqaatiginerluppaa' which means 'speak badly about him'. Indeed, this style of derivation is quite common in Inuit-Yupik languages, and it contributes to the existence of stereotypically long words, because even long complex ideas expressed in a single word often come from one of not too many roots.  If you can think of any word-families, include some examples in a comment.
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