Category talk:English terms suffixed with -hood

Category:English words suffixed with -hood
What happened to livelihood and likelihood.?
 * "Livelihood" is not from lively: + -hood: (which would mean something like the state of being "lively"). Is is from Middle English, which comes from Old English words meaning "course of life". The spelling was influenced by the suffix -hood. DCDuring TALK 00:29, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
 * "Likelihood" was formed in Middle English (14th century). All the words in the category are supposed to have been formed in Modern English. DCDuring TALK 00:29, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
 * But Middle English is an earlier stage of English rather than an entirely different language. Just so happens we have different codes for them (en and enm) but it doesn't make them separate languages. Mglovesfun (talk) 00:47, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't have access to something that shows how the ME term was spelled. I don't assume that it was formed from -hood. In any event the different codes reflect a consensus view among linguists who care about such things on the value making a distinction. DCDuring TALK 01:51, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not saying there's no distinction, just that the formation of happened before Modern English, but it did nonetheless happen in English. Mglovesfun (talk) 01:54, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I was trying to say that we don't know for sure that "likely" + "-hood" (rather than, say, -hode) was the formation because Middle English is sufficiently different from Modern English that we can't count on our knowledge of Modern English on the applicable Middle English orthography. Perhaps you can make such inferences, but they may be based on your experience with Anglo-Norman and Old French. DCDuring TALK 19:18, 10 March 2011 (UTC)