The twin base <sume/sumpt>

The Twin Base <sume / <sumpt>

In September 2005 Kobi Pham and Jeremy Ingraham conducted an investigation into the denotation of the French loan word <resumé>. As part of their analysis they explored the morphology of the word and generated a word net and a word web for the twin base: <sume / sumpt>.

The results, as documented by Kobi, are illustrated on the left.

An analysis of <sumptuous>

Then in May 2006, prompted first by the analysis of the misspelling <*sumptus> and then by a question regarding the letter <u>, Hamza, Mahnoor and Rabia Khan conducted an etymological study that provided a much deeper understanding of the evolution of the word <sumptuous>.

The misspelling <*sumptus>

The first observation that can be made about this misspelling is that the writer had a fair idea of what the word meant and had, whether intentionally or not, identified the base element <sumpt>.

What was also clear was that this writer was unsure of the suffixes available and had reverted to determining the spelling of the suffix based on the sound of the word’s pronunciation:

The shewa, used to pronounce the vowel letters of the suffix, made it almost impossible for the writer to identify the spelling of the suffix from the pronunciation of the word, hence the error in spelling. <sumptuous> is an adjective and takes the adjective forming suffix <-ous>:

sumpt + u + ous → sumptuous

The Question about the <u> - Is it a Connecting Vowel or part of the Base Element?

The Background

The Khan family and I were exploring the word <sumptuous> and had made a tenuous connection between it and the twin base <sume/sumpt> except that the meaning didn’t seem to check out. We did some more research and found that the word had come into English via the French from sumptuōsus a Latin derivative of sumptus, and ultimately, as we had initially assumed from sumere – ‘to take, take up, spend’ which in turn came from the prefix sub- ‘under’ + emere ‘take’.

While we were clear about the word’s path into English we were still a little unsure as to the base. Was it (as John Kennedy in his 1890 edition of Word Stems suggested) a separate base spelled <sumptu>? or did it use the base <sumpt> with a connecting vowel?

The Analysis

We started our analysis by collecting related words and found that all those with the denotation of ‘expensive, dear, costly” indeed used only the stem <sumptu>, so was this the base?. John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins made the link to the <sume/sumpt> twin base, but we couldn’t find any examples of words which use the <sume> element to denote ‘expense’ or ‘luxury’. Knowing that meaning comes first we took the holding position that even though it came from the same root originally its path had branched early enough for <sumptu> to be a separate base element. but...

... this raised another query: if the <u> of <sumptuous> is part of the base, then it is cannot be a connecting vowel, even though it was in the Old French sumptueux and also in the Latin sumptuōsus all of which came from the same Latin root sumpt(us). So this suggested that base element had to be the twin base <sume/sumpt>.

We needed some help and so posed our questions to Melvyn Ramsden. Melvyn took us back to the denotation of the word and made the following points:

1. A 'sumptuous' occasion is one where quantities of consumables (purchased - Latin <em(ere) / empt(um)> "buy, obtain") are consumed by a typical consumer society which assumes ("buys into") its habits of consumption and is characterized by a resumption ("re-obtaining/purchase") of those presumptions ("already bought-into notions").

2. There is semantic continuity, both denotational and connotational, in the various synchronic English derivatives of the Latin-origin twin <sume / sumpt> (whose Latin etymon itself had the root: <su(b + e)mere>).

3. 'Luxury' and 'sumptuousness' are rather distant synonyms. The denotation of 'luxury' is rather "excess", with a heavy pejorative tendency (it's also the root of <lechery>!). 'Sumptuous' has little or no pejorative impetus.

And so our dilemma was resolved, illustrating that Kobi and Jeremy’s initial analysis had been correct, but with the added satisfaction that now we know why.

You can learn more about twin bases in Kit 5,

Theme H

of the Real Spelling Toolkit.