The other day I happened to be contemplating the word puerile. (In a phone conversation with my sister I mentioned South Park....) I knew — from Carmina Burana if nowhere else — that puer is the Latin word for a young boy, but I don't think I had ever made the connection to puerile.

Now thinking in terms of suffix, I tried to think of other -ile words, and by strange chance the only three I could quickly come up with (senile, juvenile, and infantile) are all of them age-related terms. Coincidence?

Later I came up with more adjectives ending in -ile (fertile, mobile, futile, virile), but these are all different in that they have evolved pronunciations in which the final syllable is reduced to a weak L sound. Three of them aren't really suffixed at all, since there's no obvious Latin noun to which the -ile is attached. For the fourth, I vaguely recall that vires means something like power (from which we get the vice in vice-president or viceroy, meaning "exercising the power of"). Looking in my Latin dictionary, I see that the root of that is vir, meaning a grown man, bringing us back to the original pattern of a noun for a person of a certain age.

On reflection, I think the weakening of the pronunciation of the final syllable is probably not directly related to whether -ile is a true suffix; rather, I suspect the strong pronunciation is preserved in three-syllable words but lost in two-syllable words, with senile being an exception.

Still later I came up with one more fitting the original pattern, but not age-related: mercantile. Could the underlying pattern be that -ile is a suffix attached only to a person noun? Looking in the Latin dictionary, I notice that puerile, juvenile, and senile are already adjectives in Latin, while infantile and mercantile are not. Not only that, but mercantile seems to have acquired the suffix even later, since the original Latin is just mercator (whence market), and the "n" didn't get inserted till later.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, just sharing some idle trains of thought. Yes, this is the sort of thing I contemplate when my brain is free to roam.

As I collect a list of more words, most of them seem to be in the fertile-mobile category: docile, fragile, hostile, nubile, sterile, volatile; ductile, febrile, fissile, motile, servile, penile, tactile, erectile, projectile.

All of them seem to allow for a prissy (or British) pronunciation maintaining the long I sound in the final syllable, but in most cases it's not the preferred pronunciation for Americans. The three-syllable words mostly keep the long vowel, but now volatile emerges as an exception. I see no clear pattern for the two-syllable ones that keep the long vowel. Why, for instance, should nubile resist being deformed to "nooble"? There seems to be a slight pattern whereby words with a short vowel in the first syllable also shorten the second while words beginning with a long vowel don't, but then mobile and futile break that pattern.

On first glance, imbecile looks like it ought to be of a kind with puerile and infantile, but it turns out to have a completely different origin, where the -ile isn't a suffix at all.

Reptile does derive from an adjective that fits our pattern here (but crocodile does not). In Middle English reptile meant creeping or crawling, from which certain reptile animals came to be classed as simply "reptiles", but that meaning seems to be completely extinct, and any contemporary usage of reptile to describe a lowly person derives from the animal.

(Still not going anywhere with this....)

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