Talk:midwife

Midwifed and midwived get approximately the same number of hits on Google. For people not knowing the verb "midwive," using the noun "midwife" to directly form the verb "to midwife" is a normal process. Reference "flied" in baseball, based on a "fly" for example. Wakablogger 01:49, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * By analogy with wife : (to) wive, safe : (to) save, belief : (to) believe, grief : (to) grieve, thief : (to) thieve, half : (to) halve, calf : (to) calve, wolf : (to) wolve, leaf : (to) leave (sense 4 only), sheaf : (to) sheave, behoof : (to) behoove, strife : (to) strive, etc., and more obscurely in staff : (to) stave (compare irregular plural staves), life : (to) live, all of which exhibit a morphophonological alternation ([f] in the noun vs. [v] in the verb) whose origins lie in Old English (in Middle English, when final -e was still pronounced, the background was still clearer: [f] was voiced between vowels, or actually, [v] underwent final devoicing to [f]; in fact, [f] and [v] were essentially allophones of a single phoneme in Old English), the verb should be midwive. Compare the same voicing contrast in breath : (to) breathe, close : (to) close. Of course, this process isn't really active anymore, and the usual, productive derivational pattern is simply noun → verb with no overt marking. (In Romance lexicon, such as record : (to) record, the accent may shift so that the noun has initial and the verb final accent, but this is probably simply analogical to pairs such as noun *uzdaila- > ordeal, German Urteil with initial stress on the prefix : verb *uzdailijanan > German erteilen, where the prefix is unstressed.) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:48, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Verb inflections
Are these verb inflections the correct inflections for midwife:, or have we mixed them up with those of another form, midwive:? Equinox ◑ 11:57, 21 April 2012 (UTC)