Talk:-tion

motivate is a verb as is celebrate, is motivation or celebration a verb or a noun??

Clicking on the links motivation and celebration seems a fair starting point to me. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:07, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

English alt forms

• Is "-shon" an attestable English alt form? Frederick Gard Fleay's The Victoʹrian Alphabet (ULB Halle) has "nota'shon", "limita'shons", "pronuncia'shon".
• What about w:Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet? The example has "pronunciation" and "distinction" written in this alphabet. wikipedia's approximation is -իɥn.

-84.161.13.227 17:46, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

These are old proposed spelling reforms that never caught on at all. Equinox ◑ 18:11, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Not a suffix

-tion is not a suffix. Only -ion is a suffix. The <t> is part of the base spelling. This entry should not exist except as a gateway to -ion. — This unsigned comment was added by LinguisticsGirl.Librarian (talk • contribs).

@LinguisticsGirl.Librarian: If you want to request an English entry for deletion, you can add {{rfd|en}} to the top and then click the little plus sign on the notice, and then explain why it should be deleted. The community will vote on whether it will be deleted or not. Julia ☺ ☆ 06:32, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks!

-tion is not a suffix. Only the -ion portion is the suffix. The <t> is part of the base. For example, <Act + ion -> action>, <Opt + ion -> option>. The same is true of -sion, -xion, and -cion, and other variations thereof. Identifying these as suffixes is incorrect. https://languageinnerviews.com/2017/08/02/debunking-the-myth/ LinguisticsGirl.Librarian (talk) 22:26, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

RFD discussion: May–September 2019

The following information passed a request for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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-tion

RFD'd by User:LinguisticsGirl.Librarian with the reasoning: "-tion is not a suffix. Only the -ion portion is the suffix. The <t> is part of the base. For example, <Act + ion -> action>, <Opt + ion -> option>. The same is true of -sion, -xion, and -cion, and other variations thereof. Identifying these as suffixes is incorrect. https://languageinnerviews.com/2017/08/02/debunking-the-myth/" — surjection ⟨?⟩ 22:32, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

-sion

RFD'd by User:LinguisticsGirl.Librarian with the reasoning: "-sion is not a suffix. Only the -ion portion is the suffix. The -sion is not a suffix. Only the -ion portion is the suffix. The <s> is part of the base. For example, <fuse + ion -> fusion>, <Vise + ion -> vision>. The same is true of -tion, -xion, and -cion, and other variations thereof. Identifying these as suffixes is incorrect." — surjection ⟨?⟩ 22:32, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

This suffix business is a bit of a mess, also for Latin. One cause of the mess are the ancient Romans themselves, who rebracketed suffixed words and split off false suffixes for reuse in forming (at the time) neologisms. Is -tiō a Latin suffix? We use it to explain cōnstitūtiō as cōnstitu(ō) +‎ -tiō, but additiō is explained as being formed from the past participle of addō: addit(us) +‎ -iō. The latter type of explanation works just as well for cōnstitūtiō: cōnstitūt(us) +‎ -iō. Similarly for most Latin words ending on -atiō; we explain a word like laudatiō as laudō +‎ -tiō, but it is more easily analyzed as laudat(us) +‎ iō. However, this has not withheld the speakers of Latin from rebracketing this as laud(ō) +‎ -atiō and use the newly discovered suffix to form new words such as sēnsātiō instead of a regular *sēnsiō. I do not know of examples, though, of Latin words ending on -tiō that can only be analyzed as stem + -tiō.

Of course, almost all English words ending in -tion are borrowed, usually through (Old) French, from Latin, so for English the issue is only relevant for words that started their English life as neologisms. I think resilition is an example, formed by extracting a stem resili- from resilient and gluing on -tion. English bibation was probably coined by someone who was not a Latinist using the suffix -ation probably on the model of libation; a more regular formation would have been *bibition; compare imbibition. French dilution is said to come from diluer +‎ -tion, rather than Latin dīlūtiō, which is attested in Late Latin but only in a figurative sense.

In summary, many etymologies of in particular Latin words ending on -iō can IMO have a better analysis, but we should be careful not to do away with those suffixes that may have resulted from rebracketing and that can be attested as such.  --Lambiam 14:45, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

The regular formation of an abstract noun from the verb resiliō in Latin ending in iō, instead of resilitiō, would have been resultiō. This word is not in L&S, but I see it is attested (apparently as a hapax legomenon) in Medieval Latin, in a letter of authority of Louis the Pious: [1].  --Lambiam 10:43, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

See also WT:RFC#-tion, and I recall discussing this word somewhere else too, where we reached the decision to add the "non-productive" label because all modern uses seemed to be -ation (and, as DCDuring mentioned at RFC, perhaps also -ition), including some which are (thus erroneously) in Category:English words suffixed with -tion. At least one word seems to use -tion rather than -Vtion, though: scrimption. We should make an effort to find others. - -sche (discuss) 16:35, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

I remember bringing up -ation as a justification for keeping -ren (ME -er + -en) because the argument for deleting -ren was that it was "not a suffix, but 2 suffixes added together" in Middle English. Needless to say, the original information for -ren was removed (it's still accessible in the History though, and the discussion is on the Talk page). Leasnam (talk) 01:27, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

What about other languages?

"-tion" and "-sion" are not the only "prefixes" that are derived from Latin "-tio" and "-sio". There is also -ción from Spanish, -ção from Portuguese, -zione and -gione from Italian, etc. Are we to nominate those for deletion too? 24.246.118.194 11:19, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Keep all of these. Other dictionaries have them (e.g. Random House, Macquarie, Oxford). The Macquarie defines as: "a composite suffix used to form abstract nouns consisting of the final consonant of participial and other stems, plus -ion, used to express an action (revolution, commendation), or a state (contrition, volition), or associated meanings (relation, temptation). Also, -ation, -cion, -sion, -ion, -xion." - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 04:42, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Keep, IMO; it's a grey area, but the existence of a few words formed directly with this, and the presence in other dictionaries that Sonofcawdrey mentions, and the lack of an (IMO) compelling reason to delete, make me say keep. (I would like to re-locate, just for completeness, the discussion that led to the "non-productive" label being applied, which I recall DCDuring and I participated in.) - -sche (discuss) 21:21, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

• RFD kept: no consensus for deletion. For reference: “-tion”, in OneLook Dictionary Search., “-sion”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:38, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

RFC discussion: December 2017–December 2019

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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-tion

The usage examples and many(most?) of the derived terms are not of terms derive from -tion, but rather of terms derived from -ion applied to a stem ending in t. And sometimes the word was actually taken on board English directly or via French from Latin, ie, from a Latin word ending in -atio. That means that [[-tion]] and will direct the contributor to many etymology sections that need to be corrected. DCDuring (talk) 16:06, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

I have partially cleaned out Category:English words suffixed with -tion. I see some evidence for a suffix -ition, preferred to -ation in some cases, possibly for euphony. DCDuring (talk) 21:07, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Many invalid entries have recently been added to the category. This will probably require ongoing cleanup. See also WT:RFD#-tion, where the suffix is proposed for deletion, although at least one word (scrimption) does seem to use it. - -sche (discuss) 16:54, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Why would someone do that? Don't people believe in Occam's razor, if nothing else?

 Done DCDuring (talk) 18:47, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

This has, indeed, required ongoing attention/cleanup; I just removed three more entries from the category, burnination, familiarization, and infuriation, which seem to use -ion or -ation instead. - -sche (discuss) 05:57, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

equation /iˈkweɪʒən/

How to best mention this exception? JMGN (talk) 11:43, 1 August 2024 (UTC)