§233. Primary Suffixes

The words in Latin formed immediately from the root by means of Primary Suffixes, are few. For—

• Inherited words so formed were mostly further developed by the addition of other suffixes, as we might make an adjective lone-ly-some-ish. meaning nothing more than lone, lonely, or lonesome.
• By such accumulation of suffixes, new compound suffixes were formed which crowded out even the old types of derivation. Thus,—

A word like mēns, mentis, by the suffix ōn- (nom. -ō), gave mentiō, and this, being divided into men + tiō, gave rise to a new type of abstract nouns in -tiō: as, lēgā-tiō, embassy.

A word like audītor, by the suffix io- (nom. -ius), gave rise to adjectives like audītōr-ius, of which the neuter ( audītōrium) is used to denote the place where the action of the verb is performed. Hence tōrio- (nom. -tōrium), N., becomes a regular noun-suffix (§ 250. a).

So in English such a word as suffocation gives a suffix -ation, and with this is made starvation, though there is no such word as starvate.