Talk:Clitic

message: One final question:  if τε is from -kwe as well
as -ca in Sanskrit and Latin -que, is και (the primary
word for "and" in common Greek) also related, or is its similarity a
coincidence?  (This final question is off-topic, since kai is not a
clitic, but I'm curious.) -- Jonadab
:It's probably not related to -τε, though there don't appear to be any secure cognates from other roots.  Pokorny derives it from *kai 2 (519), and relates it (uncertainly) to Old Church Slavonic cě in a cě and cě i (apparently meaning something like "also, indeed"), as well as Latin ceu "as, just as", though this is usually referred to *k'e-iwe (from the pronominal stem *k'-).  —Muke Tever 03:07, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: &kappa;&alpha;&iota;

message: This is a reply to an unregistered user and a warning that might be useful in the future, as this tends to repeat from time to time. Please keep the warning at the top of this page.
An anonymous user inserted the following text in the intro:
:The English genitive is sometimes regarded, illogically, as a clitic, as in the phrase "the Church of St Andrew's steeple," since the steeple belongs to the church and not to the deceased St Andrew. However, most people realize that this is an awkward construction and would phrase it as "the steeple of St Andrew's church," or "St Andrew's Church's steeple."
A clitic attaches to phrases (a phrase might consist of a single word, or more). In "the Church of St Andrew's steeple", the clitic indeed marks a possession of the church and not of St Andrew; the phrase that the possessive attaches to is "the Church of St Andrew":
:[the Church of [St Andrew]]'s steeple
If -'s was a case suffix, as implied, then it would be awkward and wrong:
:*the Church of [[St Andrew]'s steeple]
The problems of interpretation and ambiguity arise from the fact that English has two different genitive constructions (right-branching with of, and left-branching with -'s).
--Pablo D. Flores 22:12, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Very true... Especially since "awkwardness" doesn't equal ungrammaticality... and there are much less awkward examples than the steeple, such as "the Queen of England's iPod broke" which is better than "the iPod of the Queen of England broke", IMO.  —Muke Tever talk (la.wiktionary) 23:58, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: Clitics are not necessarily abbreviations.  The suffix -'s is not an abbreviation. In Japanese, all case markers are clitic postpositions. - TAKASUGI Shinji 23:29, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

text: While Zwicky clearly knows his stuff, the English genitive is commonly cited as a model clitic in linguistics courses.  Moreover, Zwicky's argument doesn't hold for dialects in which the 's is not dropped after a preceding /s/ sound.  Zwicky does not argue that 's is not a clitic because it changes phonological form, but because it drops (in some dialects) after /s/ or /z/, and therefore behaves as a phrase-final inflection.  In my own dialect, Katz's is pronounced /kætsəz/.  Any argument that would deny clitichood based on a phonological change is untenable, as there are languages (i.e. Irish, with its consonant mutations) where lexical items that are clearly "words" undergo phonological changes conditioned by the preceding words. Straughn 22:18, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, you misunderstand. (Don't worry, it took me a few reads to understand what was being said, too.) Zwicky's point is that "cats" and "Katz" are pronounced identically, but the genitive marker behaves differently depending which one it's attached to: it's silent in the case of "cats'", and pronounced /əz/ in the case of "Katz's". Hence, it's not due to the phonology of the word, but rather to its morphology. Ruakh 22:55, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes and to further clarify, the classical definition of a clitic says that it is based in syntax. Being based in syntax it should not be able to interact with the preceeding morphology or even phonology. Both are below the word level whereas syntax occurs only with whole words, phonology rarely changes due to differening syntactix structure. The genitive /s/ USUALLY acts the same as a regular clitic, but it behaves in ways that clitics normally aren't able and so, Zwicky argues, it deserves it's own category (I'm not sure if there are any other examples of this). "Phrasal affix" does seem to fit the role of genitive /s/ quite well, though, as it acts as an affix to an entire phrase, attaching itself as a clitic does while being morphologically conditioned, just like an affix (I hope that was more clear this time, thanks for helping me explain, Ruakh). Saben4 05:16, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: So, question: Hebrew has seven one-letter prefixes, with the meanings in, the, and, like (as a preposition), to, from, and that (as a conjunction and relativizer). With the exception of the, these all tend to introduce multi-word phrases; in ancient China, for example, is in-China the-ancient. With the exception of that, they all change pronunciation depending on the first syllable of the word they introduce; and, for example, is pronounced /və/, /va/, /vi/, /vɔ/, /vɛ/, or /u/. (Well, supposedly. In practice, people no longer actually talk that way; but let's assume traditional pronunciations for the sake of argument.) Additionally, they all can engender form-changes in the noun they introduce; for example, Belgium is /'bɛlgia/, but in-Belgium is /bə-'vɛlgia/. Finally, the four prepositions merge with and, taking the consonant of the preposition and the vowel of the and. (This one affects spelling as well: the letter for and disappears.) It seems like they're not ordinary prefixes, because except for the, they attach to entire phrases or clauses; but by your description, it seems like they're not clitics, either. So would they also be phrasal affixes? Ruakh 14:58, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

text: Surely a case ending can also be a clitic? The Saxon Genitive as seen in both English and Swedish is strongly argued as a clitic, yet shows strong ties to also being a case ending. The same could be taken for many Russian case endings on masculine nouns - they add an affix without altering the stress or final sound of the original noun, namely prepositional (-ye), instrumental (-om), accusative (-oo), genitive (-a). 87.194.56.53 (talk) 21:33, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

text: Well, in the 1960's when I was in high school, on the occasion of a class trip to England, my schoolmates and I visited St James's Park (in Westminster), and for all I know it hadn't acquired that final s in the latest ten years but had always been St James's Park, not St James' Park. What I was told in school is that plurals ending in s take a plain apostrophe for the genitive (the cats', the kings', etc.) and that all other words take 's (the men's, the women's, the children's, King James's, Bob Katz's, etc.) And BTW I learnt to pronounce James's as /'ʤeimsɪz/, not anything ending in /əz/. — Tonymec (talk) 03:26, 21 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: English genitive is a clitic

message: Okay, I came to this article wanting to know what a clitic was.  I left, wanting to know what a clitic was.  The discussion page was more helpful than the article, but I don't have a grasp of the subject.  So a clitic is a morpheme that can't stand on its own...but I still don't get what distinguishes it from an affix.  NickelShoe 19:56, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Accessibility

message: In Cell microprocessor the first sentence reads: 
:Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by a Sony, Toshiba, and IBM alliance known as STI. 
Whenever I proof that sentence I feel a mild, uncomfortable pull to change a back to an.  I don't know whether that is because IBM is the third (and subconsciously dominant) serial adjective, or whether the noun target somehow expresses a slightly stronger solitary pull than the dissolute serial adjectives.  
It also just occurred to me that this article does not express a common aggravation with these proclitics that manifests itself in the expressions: 
* an SQL server - pronounce an ess-que-ell server
* a SQL server - prounounce a sequel server
depending on how the author prefers to vocalize the written form.  Some pedants hate the blended sequel pronunciation, but it predominates esp. in adjectival-accusative contexts such as the ever-popular your sequel statement has a syntax error.  MaxEnt 02:35, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If I were you, I would probably change that sentence to say something like, "Cell is a microprocessor architecture developed by an alliance known as the STI whose members are Sony, Toshiba, and IBM," if somebody hasn't already done so by now.  — RandomDSdevel (talk) 20:59, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Proclitic complexities

message: ISTR that clitics are used profusely in Welsh, but I don't know enough linguistics to add the information myself. I do know that the definite article "yr" becomes "'r" after vowels, and ISTR that verbs can be thoroughly contracted such that Yr ydych chwi yn eistedd (we are sitting) contracts to Rydych chi'n eistedd. Grutness...wha? 13:38, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Welsh

message: This article or section does not cite its references or sources.: This article describes general modern usage among linguists. Anthony Appleyard 06:16, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Cool, so it should be easy to find supporting references, such as introductory-level linguistics textbooks. Ruakh 04:14, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sources

message: Added ze (3rd person plural pronoun), as it's on par with je I think, although I'm not sure whether either is a true clitic since both can function as non-clitics, but they can be in the same position as ie which is clearly a clitic as it cannot stand on its own. I removed the ortography of ie as -ie including the example, as this just isn't true - common ortography does not add a hyphen, but has it stand alone ('heeft ie het gedaan?' rather than 'heeft-ie het gedaan?') JAL 85.223.48.149 20:28, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Cool. Although I think this information would be more useful in Dutch grammar#Personal and possessive pronouns or Dutch declension. (It's sort of already in both, which is also a problem.)  CapnPrep 21:13, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

text: I disagree. 'Je' instead of 'jij', 'we' instead of 'wij' (yes, that exists too), "'t" instead of 'het', 'ie' instead of 'hij' are simply unstressed forms of the pronouns. If those are to be considered 'clitics', then the unstressed "'m" in "I'm" or the unsteressed "'re" in "they're" ought to be considered clitics too -- and I think we have a problem here. Vidyasagara (talk) 15:01, 29 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Although I've yet to find a source that calls "we" "'t" etc. clitics (and despite my 9yo remark above, I'm now not sure "ie" is a clitic either), "m" and "re" actually are clitics, or even affixes, as this article also describes. Jalwikip (talk) 15:58, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

text:  Agree with Vidyasagara. The nub of the problem seems to be this: a clitic "cannot stand on its own" but "functions syntactically like a normal word" (there are not many words that can be sentence (utterance) all by themselves except in rather contrived circumstances, but we'll let that slide for now). A de-stressed pronoun form can only occur adjacent to a word that takes the stress, and in that sense satisfy a criterion for clitic-ness (cliticality?). Syntactically, ie functions just like hij (zij, het) which everybody agrees is a pronoun and not a clitic. One could almost make the case that ie is a surface variant of hij which is only distinguished at the level of pronunciation (which indeed is what is was to begin with). But then we have to ask why we find hij and ie in alternation in written Dutch (and indeed if ie should have a place in written Dutch). The answer is that using ie for hij (or zij) conveys a degree of informality, and hence possibly of attachment or else of mockery or disrespect (depending on the speaker's relationship to the person referred to as ie). I give this longish discussion of syntactical and lexical aspects of ie to show how it is not your common garden-variety clitic, or, as Vidyasagara says, not a clitic at all. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:2487:4AE5:1F2C:57A2 (talk) 07:26, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dutch clitics 

message: "A clitic must attach to an adjacent word, known as its host." Then how can the article "the" in "the house" be a clitic? If it were, it should be "big the house" instead of "the big house", right? (like in Swedish "stora huset")
Apus 11:58, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The host is the first word of the noun phrase (not necessarily the noun itself). A clitic can combine syntactically with a phrase, and depend phonologically/prosodically on the leftmost (or rightmost) word of that phrase. CapnPrep 14:58, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "The", "a" and "an" 

message: So what's a cletic then in the English language, from this article it seems to just be a Contraction or "a" or "the" although I'm not sure why. Is that right? I've read the article and that's all I've learnt. Could perhaps the concept be described a tad simpler before launching into linguistic lingo? Caffm8 00:25, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I have to second this. The introduction is so technical as to be unintelligible to an otherwise decently educated layman. --Sylvank (talk) 06:01, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: In short, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonetically dependent word.  It's pronounced like a prefix or a suffix, but works at a phrase level.  The phrase my wife's brother has three phonetic groups: my, wife's, and brother, but the grammatical structure is (my wife)'s brother.  Here, 's is phonetically attached to the word wife but grammatically combined with the phrase my wife. - TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 07:27, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I have added the sentence above to the article.  In addition, I have changed the word many in "many clitics can be understood as elements undergoing a historical process of grammaticalization" to some.  The English 's is from the grammatical suffix, not from a lexical word, and most Japanese postpositions are clitics from the beginning. - TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 14:50, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, I think that's a more accessible introduction. --Sylvank (talk) 18:57, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Say eh, what? 

message: Is the saxon genitive involving a possession of a group (plural) of things, such as "the teachers' carpark" still called a clitic, even though it does not add a phonological unit to the word? Ninahexan (talk) 06:26, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  saxon genitive as a clitic 

message: It has been said that:
According to most criteria, in fact, the pronominal clitics in most of the Romance languages have already developed into affixes.
I think it's not entirely true. Joining the enclitics to the stressed word (i.e. writing, for instance, dammelo instead of da me lo in Italian) could be only an orthographic convention, probably modelled on the way the words with attached enclitics are pronounced in Latin.
89.164.229.76 (talk) 10:53, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The claim in question is not based on orthographic arguments. The clitics in me lo darai also behave like affixes, even though they are written separately by convention. Anyway, the statement is sourced, so you will have to find a counter-source to challenge it. CapnPrep (talk) 19:27, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clitics in Romance languages 

message: This may seem obtuse, but can I suggest that the allegedly rare endoclicic may actually be more common in English than we give it credit. The word F***ing (and some other swear words) can be used within words - splitting the root - in order to add extra emphasis e.g Tues-f***ing-day, which can be written without the hyphens. Admittedly this is often for comedic effect - but it is real usage (or more properly, perhaps, abusage) . Irvine Welsh is a writer with a penchant for the form.
There'd again, maybe it's not worth mentioning.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doctordjbrown (talk • contribs) 09:54, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting idea. I am not a linguist, but while it's clear that if this use of "fucking" is a clitic then it must be an endoclitic (making for a great pun, of course), it may actually not be a clitic at all. I think that to prove that it is an endoclitic, we would need a word such that if you split it with "fucking", the pronunciation of "fucking" changes from the normal one. But as I understand this construction, there is always a clear gap before and after "fucking". The closest thing that I found is this theoretical example: "gin-fucking-ger". A person who normally pronounces "fucking" with ng at the end might pronounce it as "gin-fuckin'-ger" instead in this particular case. Come to think of it: In the same way, we might be able prove that more standard uses of this intensifier are as a clitic. For example, a person might say "killing Germans", "singing Germans" etc., and "fucking Italians" but "fuckin' Germans" . Hans Adler 11:18, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not a clitic, it's expletive infixation. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:16, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Swear words as endoclitics 

message: This post is pretty much self-explanatory:  can anybody provide this article with some examples of proclitics to go in the 'Examples' → 'Proclitics' section?  
— RandomDSdevel (talk) 21:08, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Examples of Proclitics? Suggestion 

message: would be 'the king's of England horse' actually....the horse of the king-of-England, not the regent of England's horse....
:What makes 's a clitic here is that it attaches to the phrase as a whole, while the head word remains the possessor even though it does not directly receive the 's. It is precisely because the clitic does not alter the meaning in the way you indicate that it is a clitic. If you wish to argue that it should not be clitic because you feel that forming possessives of phrases is ungainly, then I would have to agree with you on a personal level but we have to admit that the two of us are not here to proscribe usage to the community of English speakers. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:2487:4AE5:1F2C:57A2 (talk) 07:39, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  correct grammar 

message: Here's how it reads now: In morphology and syntax, a clitic (/ˈklɪtᵻk/ from Greek κλιτικός klitikos, "inflexional") is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent, always attached to a host.[1] The term is derived from the Greek for "leaning".[2] It is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level.
The trouble is with "It" in the last sentence. Under normal rules, "It" refers to the previous sentence, so that the final sentence means: [the term] is pronounced like an affix. But the meaning really is: a clitic is pronounced like an affix. I've changed the last sentence to make that clear. Omc (talk) 00:39, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fix wording of opening paragraph to clarify ambiguity 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Herein on 30 September 2005, user NickelShoe created new Talk Page section, titled “Accessibility.” Although I don’t share the user’s seeming frustration with this article’s verbiage, I’d like to echo the apparent perplexity that the user expressed upon reading the article. Despite how I credit the article’s various contributors for their efforts, I’m not satisfied that the sum of those efforts enables lexical cogency concerning what a clitic fundamentally does and does not entail. Also, whereas I benefited from the numerous morphological, phonological, and linguistic considerations related in this article, its cobbling of too many un-sourced, paradoxical, and outmoded assertions creates an untenable notion of what a clitic is supposed to be.
Specifically, the article’s lead sentence defines “clitic” as a morpheme that “depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host.” That definition is troubling in two respects: (1) it offers an idea of what a clitic does but not what it is, and (2) equivocates the definition sourced from LinguaLinks, which indeed provides that “A clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but shows evidence of being phonologically bound to another word.” While the LingaLinks definition is too nebulous to satisfy my lexical expectations, the distinctions between it and the article’s definition are quite stark.
It might be worthwhile to say I’m invariably dissatisfied with any linguistic definition that appears to be premised from a naïve set theory rather than a linguistic paradigm. Indeed, all of the linguistic definitions at Wikipedia – despite the insights they provide –are glossed from intermixed global sources that stretch across innumerable theories relating to lexicology, morphology, phonology, semantics, etymology, etc. Thus, articles such as this one necessarily result in complexities which on one hand offer limitless bases for further consideration but on the other hand offer no dispositive notion of an article’s entry word or phrase.
For me, the relevant question here is not “What is a lexical definition of clitic?” That question can be readily answered by a dictionary, i.e., “a word that is treated in pronunciation as forming a part of a neighboring word and that is often unaccented or contracted” per Webster-Merriam). Rather, my question is, “What are users’ subjective notions about what a clitic represents?” In reply to that question, this article doesn’t disappoint. My conclusion: users here present an eclectic mix of observations that amount to a predictably informed on some levels, mistaken or misdirected on others, and inconsistent on the whole.
Having said all that, I’m nearing completion of my own linguistic paradigm that is based on axiomatic set theory. In that paradigm, my definition for clitic is “an affix entailing a short form of a word as part of a contraction.” That definition indeed contradicts many of the assertions in this article, but it is internally consistent with more than 800 other linguistic definitions within the paradigm. For anyone interested, my paradigm defines the English possessive {'s} and {s’} as affixes, not as clitics. The simple reason: etymologically, the English possessive {'s} and {s’} derive from a precursory {-es} suffix, not from any separate word or words. 
I hope something from this section helps at least one other person.
Kent Dominic 10:07, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Observations on "clitic" based on same church, divergent gospels 

message: "Il s'est réveillé." Unless my high school French is wrong (a possibility), this sentence literally means "he woke himself." The s' functions as the reflexive pronoun (himself). It is the common way of saying he woke up in French, but it uses the reflexive and subjective pronouns both. The given translation into English ("He woke up") clouds the message because the given English translation only uses one pronoun, and it is not the one used for the clitic in French. Dcs002 (talk) 02:59, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, but apparently de-emphasised personal pronouns count as clitics. As for the use of reflexivity, this is a vast and complex topic dealing with agency, patiency, active/passive/ergative verb morphology and so on. We hear our friend pottering about upstairs. Aha, we say, he's up. Something or somebody induced his transition from sleeping to being awake. He woke up. He was awakened, by the alarm, some other disturbance, or simply... by himself? When the agency of the subject (I mean narrative subject, not necessarily grammatical subject) is in doubt and the true agent(s) unknown, many languages avoid the passive form and go to the reflexive. Why? Because it just seems cumbersome to have something or somebody as the (grammatical and thematic) subject of the sentence. Staying with French, examples can be multiplied at will "cela se dit ..." = that is pronounced as ... ; "se faire ..." = having ... happen to oneself. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:2487:4AE5:1F2C:57A2 (talk) 07:53, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "il s'est réveillé" not the best example 

message: As it stands, this article reads like a conversation among academics, not an encyclopedia entry whose purpose is to enlighten the average reader. Every definition or distinction throughout this article needs at least one example if it to be understandable to those without advanced degrees in linguistics. I have a PhD in English, and I found this thicket of terminology, fine distinctions, and scholarly debate impenetrable in many places. Surely there are experts in the field with a gift for making the basics of linguistics understandable to the general public. Think Introduction to Linguistics, not graduate seminar. KC 14:30, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The majority of this article already IS examples, it certainly doesn't need more of them. Some efforts could be made to make it more accessible to a broader audience, though.--Megaman en m (talk) 16:34, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  More examples 

message: As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, i think the whole chapter about sentences like  "ele tava era gordo"  feels weird,  i disagree  with both the  meaning and explanation given .
First of all, these expressions could have their essence easily translated to English. 
"Ele tava era gordo" , which literally translates to "he was was fat" , and means something like "Fat! That's  what he was" . 
"Ele ligou é pra Paula", which translates literally to "he called is for(pra) Paula", and means "He called Paula! that's what happened".
Putting it like this, it feels more confrontational than intense. It does feel intense, the point is strongly stated, but it has other reason to be. You may have noticed that both sentences could be interpreted as an answer to a question, and not only that, it's almost like these sentences are correcting another answer . I'm not saying another question was provided earliest at the dialog, the other answer is implicit, underlying , someone was expecting it up until the point the real answer made it obsolete .The person expecting other answer could be the person listening, someone that's not here, the person talking or everyone .
About the reason for the weird way it is arranged, and this wil be quick.
You just have to flip it:
"Ele tava | era gordo" -> "era gordo +que+ ele tava"
"Ele ligou | é pra ela" -> "é pra ela +que+ ele ligou"
Furthermore, you could even make sense out of the literal translation with some minor tweaks, it sounds weird only because pronouns are omitted .
(O que) ele tava era gordo ->
-(What was he?) 
-(What) he was was fat 
(Pra quem) Ele ligou foi pra Paula ->
-(Who he called?)
-(Who) he called was Paula.
Hope this makes sense to someone 2804:14C:4E8:8588:80FC:DD2C:572B:D9AE (talk) 03:37, 21 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  This expression in Portuguese is not as weird as the article makes it sound. 

message: Because this is the English language Wikipedia, this article could use more examples of English language clitics before going into examples in other languages. Most readings coming to this article are not linguists and might get a bit lost in the weeds of French, Latin, Sanskrit, and other languages they do not speak or understand. Morganfitzp (talk) 13:02, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  More examples in English 

message: "In Romance languages, some have treated the object personal pronoun forms as clitics, though they only attach to the verb they are the object of and so are affixed by the definition used here." This is not always true, at least in Spanish. In No puedo verla, la attaches to the verb it is the object of, but in No la puedo ver, which means the same (I can't see her), la attaches to the other verb. phma (talk) 06:57, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spanish pronoun clitics on verbs 

message: For example, norma is a noun, normale is an adjective but as a lemma - therefore acronim acrostic mnemonic - it means: attinente lettere elencate. It is usually defined as suffix. Sabrina.ponsi (talk) 17:05, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: –ale is a derivational suffix, not a clitic as I understand the word.  —Tamfang (talk) 04:47, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  italian -ale? 

message: There are a few comments below from 18 years ago to 2 years ago asking/suggesting a rewrite to the opening section. I have postgraduate education and am no stranger to technical jargon, but the opening is not easily understandable by a non linguist. I would help to have a much simpler explanation for general readers of wikipedia. Einstein said if you cant explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself. I'm hoping someone who understands this subject matter can take on this challenge.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Bendav (talk • contribs) 05:06, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Plea to rewrite introduction