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The Modern English-ing ending, which is used to form both gerunds and present participles of verbs (i.e. in noun and adjective uses), derives from two different historical suffixes. The gerund (noun) use comes from Middle English-ing, which is from Old English-ing, -ung (suffixes forming nouns from verbs).
Normal rules for adding suffixes beginning with a vowel apply: If the base form ends in e then only d is added (like → liked); if the base form ends in a consonant followed by y then the y is changed to i before adding the ending (try → tried; an exception is the verb sky (a ball), which can form skied or skyed).
Like the -ing suffix, the to-infinitive spread historically from a narrow original use, a prepositional phrase referring to future time. Like the -ing form it spread to all English verbs and to form non-finite clauses. Like the -ing form, it spread by analogy to use with words of similar meaning.
Historically, following the French usage, it was the practice to add a silent e at the end of words for aesthetic purposes. For example, words ending in -le (as in subtle and table) as well as following an s (such as house and tense, etc) have a redundant silent e .
Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un-or -ness. For example, unhappy and happiness derive from the root word happy.
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are derivational and inflectional affixes. . Derivational affixes, such as un-, -ation, anti-, pre-etc., introduce a semantic change to the word they are atta
When the suffix is added to a word ending in a consonant followed by le (pronounced as a syllabic l), generally the mute e is dropped, the l loses its syllabic nature, and no additional l is added; this category is mostly composed of adverbs that end in -ably or -ibly (and correspond to adjectives ending in -able or -ible), such as probably ...
NG-coalescence – reduction of the final cluster [ŋɡ] to [ŋ], in words like hang, which has occurred in all but a few English dialects. G-dropping – reduction of the final cluster [ŋɡ] to [n] in weak syllables, principally in the verb ending -ing, which has occurred in many English dialects, although not in the modern standard varieties.