We may also notice that some –able forms do not mean precisely what we might predict. Thus, comparable means `roughly equal’, not just ‘able to be compared’. In the world of wine, drinkable comes to mean ‘rather good’, not just ‘able to be drunk’, etc. This shows us that even though these words may originally arise through the invocation of derivational patterns, the results are in fact full-fledged words of the language; and as such, they can undergo semantic change independent of the words form which they were derived. This is the same phenomenon we see when the word transmission, originally referring to the act or process of transmitting (e.g., energy from the engine to the wheels of a car) comes to refer to a somewhat mysterious apparatus which makes strange noises and costs quite a bit to replace.
Finally, we can note that in some cases it is not at all evident how to establish a ‘direction’ of derivation. In Maasai, for example, there are two main noun classes (‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’), and a derivational pattern consists in taking a noun which is ‘basically’ of one class, and treating it as a member of the other. Thus, en-kéráí is a feminine noun that refers to any child, of either gender; while ol-kéráí is a corresponding masculine noun meaning ‘large male child’. Here it looks plausible to take the feminine form as the basis for the derivational relationship; but when we consider ol-abáánì (masculine) ‘doctor’ vs. enk-abáánì ‘small or female doctor, quack’ it looks as if the direction of derivation goes the other way. In fact, it looks as if what we have here is a case of a relation between two distinct patterns, where membership in the feminine class may (but need not) imply femaleness and/or relatively small size, as opposed to the masculine class which may imply maleness and/or relatively large size. When a word in either class is used in the other, the result is to bring out the additional meaning associated with the class, but there is no inherent directionality to this relationship. The possibility of back formation discussed above suggests that this interpretation of derivational relationships as fundamentally symmetrical may be applicable even to cases where the formal direction of derivation seems obvious.
Compounding
The other variety of word formation, compounding, seems fairly straightforward, even if the actual facts can be quite complex at times. Compounds are built of two (or more) independent words, and have (at least in their original form) a meaning that involves those of their components. Thus, a catfish is a kind of fish sharing some property with a cat (in this case, the whiskers). Like derived forms, compounds are independent lexemes in their own right, and as such quickly take on specialized meanings that are not transparently derived from those of their parts. We need to tell a story to explain why a hotdog is called that, why a blackboard can be white or green, etc.
Where it is possible to relate the meaning of a compound to those of its parts, it is often possible to establish a privileged relationship between the semantic ‘type’ of the whole compound and that of one of its pieces. Thus, a dog house is a kind of house (and certainly not a kind of dog), out-doing is a kind of doing, etc. When such a relation can be discerned, we refer to the ‘privileged’ member of the compound as its head, and speak of the compound itself as endo-centric.
By no means all compounds would appear to be endocentric, however: a pickpocket is neither a kind of pocket nor a kind of picking, and a sabre-tooth is a kind of tiger, not a kind of tooth. Traditional grammar provides a variety of names for different types of such exo-centric compounds, some deriving from the Sanskrit grammatical tradition in which these were of particular interest. A bahuvrihi compound is one whose elements describe a characteristic property or attribute possessed by the referent (e.g., sabre-tooth, flatfoot), a dvandva compound is built of two (or more) parts, each of which contributes equally to the sense (e.g., an Arab-Israeli peace treaty).
In some languages, the decision as to which compounds are endocentric and which are not depends on the importance we give to different possible criteria. For instance, in German, Blauhemd ‘(soldier wearing a) blue shirt’ is on the face of it a bahuvrihi compound, exocentric because it does not denote a kind of shirt. On the other hand, the gender of the compound (neuter, in this case) is determined by that of its rightmost element (here, hemd `shirt’). Semantically, blauhemd is exocentric; while grammatically, it could be regarded as endocentric with its head on the right.
Languages can vary quite a bit in the kinds of compound patterns they employ. Thus, English compounds of a verb and its object (like scarecrow) are rather rare and unproductive, while this constitutes a basic and quite general pattern in French and other Romance languages. English and German tend to h