Looking Backward: A Tale of Tmesis

The delights of digital tools are manifold, but one area in which they fail is the phenomenon of tmesis, whereby a prefix normally attached to a verb is separated, sometimes at a considerable distance due to the non-configurational nature of Greek, and thus the unwary may be led to the wrong dictionary entry. This separation, this cutting off, is an illusion, not just in translation, but in origin. It was quite logical for the Greeks who first observed this feature to call it a cutting off, a lobotomy of an intact word, for they were looking backward and needed merely a descriptive term rather than an analytical one. The science of philology was millennia away.

The true nature of the phenomenon, however, was not one of cutting, but of grafting. In earlier days, the adverb or preposition could float, and only gradually became attached to the verb. This is why some verbs could be modified by prepositional phrases, while others, to which the prefix was appended, governed cases other than the expected case. Some barbarian tongues, such as German, left this process conspicously incomplete; thus this process should be called thesis, not tmesis, but the cruel mistress of convention had established a false analysis as the official term.