Talk:người ngợm

Ngợm

@PhanAnh123, it appears ngợm also exists as an independent word. Could người ngợm then not be a compound? MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 01:55, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

I have seen these. Looks like a product of rebracketing to me, so a free morpheme developed from originally bound reduplicated part. Neither of those dictionary entries have anything convincing to suggest that it was an original free noun, stuff like nửa người nửa ngợm is just encliticization. Việt-Nam tự-điển (1931) explains it as ngu ngốc ngây dại ("stupid and/or naive"), then cites dở người dở ngợm as an example. All of these seem like native speaker's intuition getting in the way of morphological analysis to me; they understand it means something derogatory and is often paired with người, thus they "estimate" its meaning as if it's a free morpheme from the expressions they know. PhanAnh123 (talk) 03:13, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Well, it certainly has become a free morpheme now. ☺ Googling for con ngợm shows a great many examples where it can’t be người ngợm with stuff inserted (even though it is still usually paired with người somehow). (I added one quote to ngợm.) MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 03:38, 20 March 2024 (UTC)