circumfic/confix

Hi CodeCat. Thanks for your hint regarding circumfic/confix.

Your comment indicates you don't consider the terms circumfic and confix as synonyms.

Wiktionary says confix, circumfix, and ambifix are synonymous terms and wikipedia is telling me the same.

But I'm not a linguist, and there might be some sort of difference in meaning between both terms, so it would be helpful to me if you could explain in more details what you think is the difference between both terms. Thanks in advance. 91.61.96.154

What matters here is the name of the template. {{confix}} and {{circumfix}} do different things. If the names both refer to the same thing, then I agree that {{confix}} is badly named, but I guess that's just how it is for the moment. {{circumfix}} is the one that actually works the way you intended.

Thanks a lot. Now I understand what you meant. And you were right. The circumfix template clearly is the better choice.

Contrary to English, you won't find a word in German merely consisting of a prefix and a suffix alone (at least I haven't found any true example by now). You can always track down some kind of base (Grundwort),

For example, the suffix -artig is itself a compound of Art + -ig. And at times you can see users struggling with that: eigenartig, abartig.

So I definitely think, circumfix is the better template here, because it is explicitly pointing to a base.

The main case where {{confix}} is used with no base, as far as I know, is for Latin and Greek-derived words like aquaphobia. However, I really doubt whether the two parts of that word can really be properly called affixes.

The noun aquaphobia is a fine example. It is in my opinion a compound noun consisting of a head and a modifier. Here, phobia is the head while aqua merely modifies the head.

The concept of decompounding a word into a prefix and a suffix doesn't make much sence to me, since you always have a starting point, a base. And the starting point (or head) in this case is phobia not aqua.

But for the German terms this concept doesn't apply anyway. "Wasserangst" is a compound and "Aquaphobie" is considered a borrowed word with Latin and Greek roots, so no need here to decompound into a prefix and a suffix.