akilter

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:53 PM -0400 8/26/08, Mark Mandel wrote:
>On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Laurence Horn
><laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
>>  But it's hard to imagine "akilter" as involving the Greek privative
>>  prefix; the Greek derivation gets the morphology/etymology wrong,
>>  while the Old English adverbial a- prefix seems right for the
>>  morphology but gets the semantics backward.  If I were Jerry Cohen
>>  (and perhaps even if I weren't), I'd suggest a blend of "askew" with
>>  "(out of) kilter".  There is actually a family of similar descriptive
>>  terms with meanings in the same family--"astray", "askance",
>>  etc.--and maybe they did somehow attract "akilter" to their perverse
>>  ways.
>
>Oh, sure, the poster was off-target on "alpha privative". (That wasn't
>my comment, it was part of a reply in the source.)

I realized that.  But it's actually an interestingly subtle puzzle.
I'm wondering whether the formation and analysis of "akilter" as
negative/privative through influence of akimbo, awry, askew, astray,
etc. (all of course involving the OE adverbial a- rather than the
Greek privative) is parallel in a way to what happens with un-verbs,
where the effect is to assure a negative ("helping entropy along")
meaning whether through reversing a goal-oriented base  ("unfreeze",
"untighten") or redundantly reinforcing a source-oriented base
("unthaw", "unloosen").  Similarly with these a- adjectives, the
meaning ends up approximating 'a bit off', whether by reinforcing the
base ("akimbo", "awry", etc.) or reversing it ("akilter").  The fact
that "kilter" is so rare itself doesn't hurt.

LH

>  ISTM that "awry" is
>an especially good fit for a semantic (mis)model.
>
>--
>Mark Mandel
>
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