Entries tagged with talken

( 1. from adjs., as darken, deepen, harden, madden, moisten, widen. Most of the words of this type seem to have been formed in late ME. or early mod.Eng., on the analogy of a few verbs which came down from OE. or were adopted from ON.; e.g. fasten:{em}OE. fæstnian; ?brighten:{em}ONorthumb. berhtnia; harden:{em}ON. har{edh}na. In Teut. there are two classes of vbs. formed upon the ‘weak’ or lengthened stems of adjs. (suffix -on-): (a) the intransitive (or in sense pass.) vbs. which in Goth. make the inf. in -nan, and the pa. tense in -ôda; e.g. fullnan to be filled, f. fullan- full; gabignan to be rich, f. gabigan- rich; managnan to abound, f. managan- many; (b) the originally trans. vbs. in OTeut. (i)nôjan, e.g. OHG. festinôn to fasten, f. feston- (:{em}fastjon-) fast. In Eng. these two classes of vbs. can scarcely be discriminated with precision, but in most cases the intr. sense (as in deepen = ‘become deeper’) appears to be derived from the trans. sense (as in deepen = ‘make deeper’). )

In light of how many we've found so far, this suffix still confuses me.

I always want to say "talken".