

perfect passive participle victus "conquered") Sanskrit exhibits the greatest transparency of this feature amongst the Indo-European languages, with the phenomenon manifesting in three of the ten traditional verb classes, where the infix is higher-grade and accent-bearing in the strong forms, and reduced-grade in the weak forms.This phenomenon is inherited, and preserved to varying degrees, by some early daughter languages such as Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Latin language, etc. The stems of the other tenses have the root without the infix, and thus these verbs are called nasal-presents. The present tense of some Proto-Indo-European verbs, in the case of a certain number of roots, adds a nasal infix ( m, n) to the basic root. The use of ' expletive infixes' such as -fucking- and -bloody-, which are words rather than affixes, is known as tmesis.Infixes also occur in some language games.(education) This exists as a slang phenomenon. The ⟨-ma-⟩ infix (or "Homeric infix," after Homer Simpson), whose location in the word is described in Yu (2004), gives a word an ironic pseudo-sophistication, as in sophisti -ma-cated (sophisticated), saxo -ma-phone, (saxophone) and edu -ma-cation.The infix ⟨-iz-⟩ or ⟨-izn-⟩ is characteristic of hip-hop slang, for example h -iz-ouse for house and sh -izn-it for shit.None of the following are recognized in standard English.

Most are heard in colloquial speech although there are other examples, such as in technical terminology, these examples are often more accurately described as tmesis. English Įnglish has almost no true infixes and those it does have are marginal.

For a list of words relating to infixes, see the Infixes by language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
