An Introduction to Modern English Word-formation (repost)

English is the text-book example of a language that expands its vocabulary by unashamedly raiding other languages. For a thousand years new words have, like dockside imports, often borne an easily readable stamp of their country of origin: outlaw from medieval Scandinavia, gentle from medieval France, madrigal from Renaissance Italy, chutney from nineteenth-century India and karate from twentieth-century Japan, to name a few examples that indicate the chronological and geographical range. Such words clearly and interestingly reflect the contact that English-speaking peoples have had with other countries and other cultures, and so fascinated have scholars been for several generations by the patterns of word adoption that we have tended to regard this process as virtually the sole means by which changes in our vocabulary take place.

It is not, of course. We sometimes translate the foreign word we need, as Bernard Shaw did with Nietzsche's Uebermensch to produce superman; or we achieve a new means of designation by using an existing word in a different sense, as with the homosexual meaning of gay. Or -to come to the concern of the present book - we can permute existing words and parts of words to make new combinations such as the nouns boathouse, houseboat, or the adjective ungovernable.