Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

https://theboard.byu.edu/questions/64510/

Rating Pending wrote: had to look up the word "redden" to make sure he wasn't inventing it. Weird word.

It's time for fun linguistics facts! The suffix "-en" was used in Middle English and early Modern English to make adjectives into verbs. So "red" + "-en" = "redden," which means "to make red."

Other verbs formed on the same pattern are "whiten," "blacken," "brighten," "darken," "loosen," "deepen," "harden," "soften," "weaken," "strengthen," "lighten," and "fasten" (from "fast" in the sense of "secure," not in the sense of "quick").

Those are all adjectives, and another one is "short," so to make short is "shorten." But to make long is not "longen," it's "lengthen," where length is a noun. I wonder why lengthen is a "noun class" instead of an "adjective class."

Digit wrote:Those are all adjectives, and another one is "short," so to make short is "shorten." But to make long is not "longen," it's "lengthen," where length is a noun. I wonder why lengthen is a "noun class" instead of an "adjective class."

Actually, I've just realized you could make the same argument for strong / strength / strengthen. Quick! To the OED!

Yeah, I also thought of strong and -ong/-ength in general after I hit submit too.

OK, for what it's worth, both "strength" and "length" were verbs in Middle English. (E.g. "When your eyes haue done their part, Thought must length it in the hart.") So perhaps the "-en" suffix was added by analogy with other "-en" verb forms as those forms became more popular.

Also, "strongen" and "longen" sound weird. (More formally stated, perhaps there was some phonetic constraint which prevented those forms from being adopted.)

Phonetic constraint never seems to have stopped us in the past.

Sure it has. It's why we say "dogs" and "churches" with a final /z/ sound instead of a final /s/ sound (even though /s/ is the base form).