2140: Semantically Similar; Etymologically Different: -ment & -wise Oct 24, 2020

A lot of word in English that take the nominalizing ‘-ment’ suffix come from Romance languages, but this is not really related to the adverbial suffix in French ‘-ment’ such as with ‘‎finale’ + ‘-ment’ for ‘finalement’ (finally), nor its equivalents in other Romance languages like the Spanish ‘-mento’. This comes from the Latin the ablative form of ‘mens’, which means ‘mind’. In effect therefore, it is conceptually and functionally similar to the English ‘-wise’ that mean ‘in the manner of’ like ‘clockwise’, but which comes from a word (‘wise’) meaning ‘mind; manner’. The Latin was a feminine word, and hence the forms of the words to which it affixes are feminine, such as ‘vivement’ (lively) coming from ‘vive’, the feminine form of ‘vif’. The English -ment is also from Latin, but in this case it comes from a completely different word, ‘-mentum’.

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