Rebracketing (also known as resegmentation or metanalysis) is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one set of morphemes is broken down or bracketed into a different set. For example, hamburger, originally from Hamburg+er, has been rebracketed into ham+burger, and burger was later reused as a productive morpheme in coinages such as cheeseburger. It is usually a form of folk etymology, or may seem to be the result of valid morphological processes. Rebracketing often focuses on highly probable word boundaries: "a noodle" might become "an oodle", since "an oodle" sounds just as grammatically correct as "a noodle", and likewise "an eagle" might become "a neagle", but "the bowl" would not become "th ebowl" and "a kite" would not become "ak ite". Technically, bracketing is the process of breaking an utterance into its constituent parts. The term is akin to parsing for larger sentences, but it is normally restricted to morphological processes at the sublexical level, i.e. within the particular word or lexeme. For example, the word uneventful is conventionally bracketed as [un+[event+ful]], and the bracketing [[un+event]+ful] leads to completely different semantics. Rebracketing is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new etymology becomes the conventional norm. The name false splitting, also called misdivision, in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle" examples above). The name juncture loss may be specially deployed to refer to the case of an article and a noun fusing (such as if "the jar" were to become "(the) thejar" or "an apple" were to become "(an) anapple"). Loss of juncture is especially common in the cases of loanwords and loan phrases in which the recipient language's speakers at the time of the word's introduction did not realize an article to be already present (e.g. numerous Arabic-derived words beginning 'al-' ('the'), including "algorithm", "alcohol", "alchemy", etc.). Especially in the case of loan phrases, juncture loss may be recognized as substandard even when widespread; e.g. "the hoi polloi", where Greek hoi = "the". As a statistical change within a language within any century, rebracketing is a very weak statistical phenomenon. Even during phonetic template shifts, it is at best only probable that 0.1% of the vocabulary may be rebracketed in any given century. Rebracketing is part of the process of language change, and often operates together with sound changes that facilitate the new etymology. Rebracketing is sometimes used for jocular purposes, for example psychotherapist can be rebracketed jocularly as Psycho the rapist, and together in trouble can be rebracketed jocularly as to get her in trouble.
Role in forming new words Before the increased standardization of the English language in the modern period, many new words entered its lexicon in exactly the way just described. A 15th century English cook may once have said something like: "Ah, I found this ewt and this nadder in my napron while baking numble-pie." A few generations later the cook's descendant would have said: "Ah, I found this newt and this adder in my apron while baking (h)umble-pie." Over the course of time these words were misheard and resegmented: ewt became newt, nadder became adder, napron became apron, numble-pie became (h)umble pie. The force behind these particular resegmentations, and by far the most powerful force behind any such resegmentations in the English language, was the "movable-n" of the indefinite article a(n), of the possessive pronouns my(n) and thy(n), and of the old dative case of the definite article the(n). The biforms no/none, the prepositions in and on, the conditional conjunction an even, the shortened form n (and), and the inflectional endings in -n may also have played a part. Through the process of prothesis, in which the sound at the end of a word is transferred to the beginning of the word following, or conversely apheresis, in which the sound at the beginning of a word is transferred to the end of the word preceding, old words were resegmented and new words formed. So through prothesis an ewt became a newt. Conversely through aphaeresis a nadder became an adder, a napron became an apron, and a numble-pie became an (h)umble-pie. Many other words in the English language owe their existence to just this type of resegmentation: e.g., nickname, ninny, namby-pamby, nidiot/nidget, nonce word, nother, and notch through prothesis of n; auger, umpire, orange, eyas, atomy, emony, ouch, and aitch-bone, through aphaeresis of n.
Creation of productive affixes
Many productive affixes have been created by rebracketing, such as -athon from Marathon, -holic from alcoholic, and so on. These unetymological affixes are libfixes.
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