As far as languages go, English is on the promiscuous side when it comes to borrowing vocabulary. Linguists estimate that well over half of her words are not native, but have been grabbed from the likes of French, Spanish, Latin and Greek, not to mention other Romance languages, Native American languages, Celtic languages, Scandinavian languages, Semitic languages and others. (Maybe “stolen” is a better analogy than “borrow” since the “lenders” didn’t get much out of it). Yes, English is a lexical floozie.
One consequence of all this (particularly of the borrowing from Latin and Greek) is that English has a large number of roots that never occur on their own. They only show up with affixes. There is pro-gress, con-gress, re-gress, trans-gress, di-gress, but no gress. Feel free to syn-chron-ize your watches, but good luck chron-izing much of anything. It is the stuff High School English teachers live for, at least if they teach an SAT prep class.
Because of all these invasive root species, there is a handful of native roots that often are treated as though they are the same curiosity, but they are not. They deserve more careful attention, possibly even cultivation. These are Germanic roots that survived into Old English. They were often used without affixation in the modern English period even though they now have fallen into disuse. One might say that whereas the Latinate roots needed the eye-shadow of a suffix or the lipstick of a prefix to be presentable in public, these Germanic roots were comfortable without adornment. They are whelm, ruth, gruntle, and kempt.
Whelm means ‘to cover over.’ Church-goers, or at least those among them who use the classic hymns to worship, still use this root every time “My Hope is Built” is sung. At least if verse 3 isn’t excluded in order to keep the service under an hour.
Ruth (‘pity, compassion’), on the other hand, now never seems to make an appearance without the suffix -less. The antonym ruthful made it into the 17 century before falling out of disfavor. Let’s hope the maintenance of ruthless, but not ruthful, doesn’t reflect something deep about the psyche of English speakers. There is a good chance that ruth itself fell victim to pragmatism. English also has rue, which covers much of the same ground and sounds just about the same so one will do.
What about gruntle, as in dis-gruntled? Truth be told, this one is a bit of a cheat since the real root–grunt–is alive and well. Gruntle means to grunt a lot, that is ‘to grumble.’ And again, practically-minded speakers may very well just have rejected the need to keep gruntle when such a similar synonym was in play.
The kempt of un–kempt is a past tense form an Old English verb that means ‘to comb’ (and is etymologically related to the word comb, so like gruntle, this example is a bit of a cheat). Kempt started falling out of use in the 15th century, while unkempt soldiered on (well, at least in crossword puzzles). Curious that we also have messy, but not un-messy. I suspect that teenagers may be behind that mystery.
At any rate, it seems wasteful to let these roots lie in the ground dormant. I suggest a group effort to coax them back to life. “Have ruth on me officer. I was running late to a meeting.”