91. Seven-ish Affixes From My Thought-Language

(Epistemic status: Yet more of this linguistic study. Still not real, but also still the kind of not-real that's real, because what does it even mean for language to be fake?)

[Language] doesn't just have an embarassment of riches of carefully crafted words - it also has a plethora of assorted affixes for modifying, modulating, and changing the role of those words. They tend to be much simpler and easier to explain than the words themselves, and in particular I've left out common ones like nominalizers (turn a verb-like predicate into a noun-like predicate), abstractors (turn a verb- or adjective- like predicate X into things like "the act of X" or "the extent of X" or "the abstract property of X-ness" or "the idea of X"), and "-ize", i.e. "to make a thing into an X/have property X".

[-wise]: Turns a predicate-word X into "in an X way"/"in a manner clearly associated to X", roughly. Distinct from the classic "-ly" by being applicable to all function words X, not just verbs, and from the similar "-ish-ly" by being more precise.

[-wards]: Turns a location-word X into "in the direction of X"/"on a natural/obvious path towards X". Usable in a metaphorical sense, as most constructions of [Language] are - X can just as well be a location in some nebulous conceptual space, a point on a scale, or an ideological or pragmatic position. Extends "homewards" or "eastwards" to "cafe-wards" or "blue-wards".

[-able]: Turns a word X into "suitable for X"/"attractive/appetitive to X"; X is usually some agent (a person or animal) buut need not be. Overlaps with the more traditional English sense of "-able", in that (say) "diggable" can mean "capable of being dug" just as well as "suitable for digging"; in the finer sense, (name)-able means that you judge something as people especially desirable or well-suited to (name).

[pre-]: Turns a reference-class-word X into a word for a strictly larger reference class with less stringent membership requirements, or connotationally a member of specifically the set difference. "Pre-med", "pre-law", and "pre-sheaf" are all examples of this construction. Carries the additional connotation that the pre-X is not yet or not quite an X but may well never become one.

[prae-]: Takes a word X and turns it into a state abstractor of being specifically ordinally or temporally before X; an antonym of [post-]. Implies that whatever thing is [prae-X] will very likely become X in the expected course of events, or similarly that the natural next object in some sense is X.

[be-]: Takes a passive participle X and turns it into a state abstractor of "having had X happen to it, specifically and connotationally deliberately done by some agent". "Beloved", "befeathered", "becalmed", "bespoken". Can also be used as the corresponding verb, where it thus means "deliberately doing X to some target".

Frequency, certainty, and tense prefixes: These are an entire semi-open class of prefixes in [Language] which generally attach to nouns and sometimes adjectives. Some examples include [was-], [probably-], [usually-], [seemingly-], [for-now-], [unlikely-to-be-], [-to-be] (a prefix in [Language] notable for having only a suffix in English corresponding loosely to it), and [ordinarily-]. They have the expected inflective meaning: objects can change, be difficult to indentify or have that identification be uncertain, can pass away or be planned, and can be in instance of a broader pattern.

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