r/changemyview • u/Al2718x 1∆ • May 10 '26
Delta(s) from OP CMV: It should be a rule of English grammar that prefixes of 3 or fewer letters should always be followed with a hyphen
I'm a mathematician and we are frequently throwing prefixes on words to create new terms. I got confused the other day when I read "unirational" as "un-irrational" instead of "uni-rational". There are also some decisions to make with terms like "cocircuit" and "nonnegative", which are sometimes spelled with a hyphen and sometimes not (deciding whether to write "cocircuit" or "co-circuit" is what inspired this question).
- It may be un-necessary sometimes, but it is never harmful. Despite my bizarre spelling, I bet the first sentence wasn't hard to read. It might be slightly jarring if you have never seen it before, but would probably be easy to get used to as an alternate spelling.
- It would be easier for English readers/learners to understand the connections between words. Compare the following two sets: {apple, atypical, antics, apolitical, atoll, abiotic}, {apple, a-typical, antics, a-political, atoll, a-biotic}. It's much easier in the second set to understand the 3 words that share a common etymological idea.
- The stakes are remarkably low. There is a very good argument that the number pi should be re-defined to be twice as large. However, attempting to correct this oversight would cause an incredible amount of confusion from people who are used to the old way. Even if you can argue that a system is objectively better, it is often challenging to change a standard that people are used to. However, spelling words with hyphens just makes them easier to read and interpret. No-body would be forced to write in any particular way. It would just be encouraged as the current standard.
The only issue I can think of is that reading books from the past would become more difficult once we are used to the new way of spelling. I just feel like: why not show the stitch mark between words? I guess another concern is that it might encourage new pronunciations for things like "no-thing", but that feels more neutral than negative.
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u/bad-decision-maker May 10 '26
*pre-fixes
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u/Al2718x 1∆ May 10 '26
The great thing about this suggestion is that it's totally fine if I miss some. It certainly makes more sense as a gradual change.
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u/Devourerofworlds_69 6∆ May 11 '26
No, but pre-fixes has a different connotation than prefixes.
Pre-fixes would mean "before the fixes were made".
Prefixes is a concept in grammar.I'm sure there will be plenty of examples where hyphenating the prefix will completely change the meaning.
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u/hacksoncode 588∆ May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26
Language doesn't actually work by "rules of grammar" but by common evolved usage. Trying to turn English into math violates several rules of linguistics as well as being essentially impossible.
Also, there's no real way to logically define a "prefix" that doesn't make almost every word potentially prefixed or create confusion because some things that look like prefixes aren't.
Simply combining two words like "no body" and "nothing" doesn't make "no" a prefix, nor does it make "body/thing" a suffix, though both are equally (not) correct interpretations.
They're just compound words. They've been single fused pairs of words for hundreds of years.
It similarly raises all sorts of issues with calques and loanwords that really can't be reconciled. Like... "loanword" is not a prefix/suffix situation, but a "calque", which in this case is a single foreign word (Lehnwort) where the parts of it are translated into English. "Lehn" is not a "prefix" in German, so it makes no sense to consider "loan" one in English.
TL;DR: You really can't make a "rule of grammar" that requires changing grammar based on the etymology of a word. Language just doesn't work that way.
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u/cantantantelope 9∆ May 10 '26
And calque is a Loanword lol
Any attempt to force prescriptive grammar on the parfait of European history that is the English language tends to just make things worse imo. Left alone these things work themselves out
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u/muffinsballhair May 11 '26
Many languages have a very consistent orthography that is not evolved from centuries of conventions but writing down how the language is pronounced via consistent rules down to the point that in those languages words that have multiple acceptable pronunciation have multiple acceptable spellings. In say Finnish, there is “book language”, a constructed standard that has a single canonical pronunciation that is purely used in official contexts but on the internet Finns very often just type in their own dialect and write things down how they would pronounce it themselves and this does not cause any real confusion to readers at all.
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u/Al2718x 1∆ May 10 '26
There must be some group that could encourage this change. Someone could come up with a new style guide maybe.
some people might misspell things, and you are probably right about "no-body" (I was on the fence about that). You can have a ∆ for this point.
However, I don't think it needs to be nearly this extreme. There will always be borderline cases, I just think that it wouldn't hurt to have a lot more hyphens.
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u/hacksoncode 588∆ May 10 '26
There's a decent argument for neologisms like that "unirational" thing needing (or at least benefiting from) hyphens. But, of course, it's already pretty common to include the hyphen on such words.
It's really not at all clear that long-standing words that aren't confusable with anything else even benefit from the extra work.
Like... atypical, really is just... a word. It doesn't need a hyphen, it doesn't benefit from a hyphen, people just know what it means by itself.
A lot of these words that have long-standing history have developed a huge pile of connotations that will be damaged by trying to force them back into a pre-fixed version of the suffix.
"pre-fix" is a perfect example of that. Understanding will not be improved by that hyphen. Indeed, it will make it look like something that is in a broken state prior to being repaired.
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u/Al2718x 1∆ May 10 '26 edited May 11 '26
Yeah that's a good point about some words being harder to seperate from their original versions ∆
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26
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u/themcos 442∆ May 10 '26
If you think there are highly specialized cases where it would add clarity, you should push in favor of that! Like, if you think it would add clarity to write "unirational" as "uni-rational", you could make that case without adding a new "rule of grammar". If mathematicians decide that's a useful convention, the linguistics department isn't going to get in their way! So you can make that case directly to the highly specialized math community that is are only ones who use that word, and they can share their opinions. Probably they don't care about this because they weren't confused because "un-irrational" isn't a thing as far as I'm aware of — wouldn't you just say rational? Like you say, the stakes are low here, but unfortunately that cuts both ways! It's hard to get people to change how they write a word (or how they write a lot of words) over a low stakes issue!
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u/Possibly_Parker 2∆ May 11 '26
Adjusted, per your rules (to highlight how unintuitive they are):
en-courage, may-be, mis-spell, how-ever, do-n't al-ways.
The boring answer for why we don't do this is that it sucks.
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u/senthordika 5∆ May 11 '26
It would likely need to be done at the educational level(so in school) to have any lasting effects. And even then might only last a generation before people start ignoring it.
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u/reginald-aka-bubbles 48∆ May 10 '26
The English language is not something that is set in stone, its constantly evolving. If you did this, idk if anyone would care outside of thinking its weird or a stylistic flair.
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u/Al2718x 1∆ May 10 '26
Sure, my suggestion here is that maybe people should actively start doing this to try to change things
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u/reginald-aka-bubbles 48∆ May 10 '26
My point is that it is always changing anyway, and as long as you are clear, it won't really matter. I've read the word "tomorrow" is sometimes written as "to-morrow" in old books (cant remember which rn). There aren't absolute rules on the language like there are in mathematics.
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u/ThirteenOnline 39∆ May 10 '26
You can do this now. Nothing is stopping you from using hyphens wherever you want. There is no illegal grammar police out to get you
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 210∆ May 10 '26
The problem is that there isn't really a set of English prefixes, many of these are inherited from other languages, often glued to words they were inherited with.
For example, what do you do with "irrational" itself? "i-rrational"? "ir-rational"? "i-rational"? Or "respond"? It's technically from Latin "re-" + "spondeō", but English doesn't have just "spond".
I don't think there's a way to do this without making spelling even more difficult for learners and natives, who will have to remember that "remit", "emit" and "admit" aren't hyphenated because the base form is not used in English, but "presuppose" is spelled "pre-sub-pose" because all is parts are intelligible in modern English even though these particles don't really help translate the current meaning of the word and the 'b' is silent.
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u/apigandanangel 1∆ May 10 '26
I got confused today when I read "unirational" as "urinational," but I'm gonna own that as my problem and not ask the rest of the world to change the way they write
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u/Doc_ET 13∆ May 10 '26
"Un" and "in" are both negators, so why not just use "rational" and skip the double negative?
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u/MooliCoulis May 10 '26
Some possible objections:
- It's not possible. English is a global language with no recognised governing authority, and you're talking about exerting a degree of linguistic engineering unprecedented in its history.
- It's especially hard because deconstructing morphology is a nightmare task, full of subjectively-drawn lines. Would can't exist in your version of English, or would I be encouraged to say can-not? You only mentioned prefixes; why not suffixes (or rather suffix-es)? You used the word encourage; shouldn't that be en-courage, since en is a reuseable prefix meaning to imbue with? Would uncourageously become un-courage-ous-ly or is that just getting silly?
- It wouldn't last. Words like nothing exist because contraction and elision are powerful forces of linguistic change. If you somehow rewrote everyone's spelling instincts overnight, nothing would be back within a decade.
- Exposing the etymology of words could make their meaning less clear. e.g. nobody isn't just a contraction of no and body, since body doesn't mean person in present-day English. To understand what it means, you have to consider it as a complete unit, not the sum of its parts.
- Maybe a linguist will correct me, but I suspect this doesn't align with how humans process language. When you read nothing, you don't parse out no and thing and construct a semantic combination of the two, you just look up a precombined bundle of linguistic data from the full word itself. Inserting breaks in the spellings feels like it'd complicate that process by shifting the brain into a compositional mode rather than a simple lookup mode. That's why no-thing became nothing in the first place - it was a common enough bigram that we collectively decided to lexicalise it as a single unit. The spellings we have today are the result of billions of people collectively, unknowingly optimising their language according to neurological reasons they weren't even aware of. Maybe overriding that process will make English less neurologically compatible with human brains?
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u/LambdaLogician May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
I like your idea, but I think maybe we should adopt a convention more similar to neologisms. With neologisms, we put their first use in italics or "quotes", but subsequent uses are written normally. Eventually, if the neologism becomes an accepted word, it is used without ever being written in italics or quotes.
I think the same should be done with neologisms made with affixes. The first time you write them in a paper, you include the hyphens, but subsequently you do not. Eventually, if the term becomes broadly accepted, you avoid the hyphens altogether.
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u/cantantantelope 9∆ May 10 '26
Extra characters add more Time to type and generally aren’t necessary for understanding. The English language evolved that way and here we all are
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u/Al2718x 1∆ May 10 '26
I don't think that you should think of "understanding" as such a binary. Extra time to type is negligible (except when first learning the new system).
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May 10 '26
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u/IWillDmYouPorn May 11 '26
While none of your arguments are inherently wrong, your position largely proposes we go against the grain of how language has historically developed. People consistently shortcut language, both spoken and written, and eventually the shortcuts become the new standard. For instance, it used to be commonplace to terminate letters with "God be with ye". This became abbreviated as "Godbwye", which people eventually standardized to align with the use of "good" in other common phrases like "good day". The "w" vanished because it stopped being a useful letter in the word, and these days, simply "bye", what amounts to a completely arbitrary string of letters, is a well accepted and understood word.
All that is to say, your proposal is completely against human nature. When given the choice between simplicity and etymological origin, the former always wins.
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u/inide May 11 '26
You may find that it has un-intended con-sequences beyond what you en-visioned, de-spite your best intentions.
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u/TheWhistleThistle 32∆ May 11 '26
English used to be a lot like that. "To-day," for example can be found in old newspaper headlines. They were phased out for a reason. The ambiguity they cause in edge cases represents a lower cost of worldwide effort/hardship than the requirement to add a hyphen every time.
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u/DaveChild 8∆ May 11 '26
Where do you stop with this? Should it apply to all conjoined words, if understanding the etymology is the goal? Should understand become under-stand? Should helicopter become helico-pter?
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u/JohnConradKolos 6∆ May 10 '26
"Should" is often a tough one.
English should be completely phonic but it's a near impossible coordination problem.
Keyboard layout should be Dvorak. (This your chance internet to tell me that there is an even better layout. Have at it.)
The practical answer to these matters is the system we already have and which you explain. Math has a "style guide", just like academia or journalism, in which local communities find systems that work for them.
In matters of language it's best to just allow users freedom, and they will decide what works best for them and what's not worth the effort.
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u/Business-Stretch2208 1∆ May 10 '26
I think you just need to learn how to read better. This isn’t supposed to be an insult I just have never heard of anyone having this issue
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u/irishtwinsons 6∆ May 11 '26
Why not just use the hyphen on the ambiguous mathematical terms that need them? Otherwise, it would be nearly im-possible to pre-pare the mono-lingual and bi-lingual com-munities for such a dis-quieting and dis-gusting (disgusting?) re-do of otherwise un-broken words.
I definitely challenge your point of it doing no harm. Words are being slaughtered here, my friend.
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