involve productive application of the noun+ish and noun+y rules, and the same is true of a hearer or reader's understanding of them. But it will not necessarily be at all clear to an outside observer, or even to the speaker and hearer themselves, whether the form was already learnt and whether the rules were applied or not. English and productive forms Developments over the last five hundred years or more have meant English has developed in ways very different from the evolution of most world languages across history. English is a language with a long written past that has preserved many words that might otherwise have been lost or changed, often in fixed texts such as the King James Version of the Bible which are not updated regularly to modernise their language. English also has many conventions for writing polite and formal prose, which are often very different from how people normally speak. As literacy among English-speakers has become almost universal, it has become increasingly easy for people to bring back into life archaic words and grammar forms, often to create a comic or humorously old-fashioned effect, with the expectation that the new coinings will be understandable. Those processes would be much rarer for languages without a culture of literacy. English has also borrowed extensively from other languages because of technology and trade and often borrows both plural and singular forms into standard English. For example, the plural of radius (from Latin) has not decisively settled between radiuses and the original Latin radii, but educated opinion prefers the latter. In some cases, new words have been coined from these bases (often Latin) on the same rules. Examples in other languages One study, which focuses on the usage of the Dutch suffix -heid (comparable to -ness in English) hypothesizes that -heid gives rise to two kinds of abstract nouns: those referring to concepts and those referring to states of affairs. It shows that the referential function of -heid is typical for the lowest-frequency words, while its conceptual function is typical for the highest-frequency words. It claims that high-frequency formations with the suffix -heid are available in the mental lexicon, whereas low-frequency words and neologisms are produced and understood by rule. See also Word formation Inflection References Baayen, Harald. (1992). Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity. In G. Booij & J. van Marle (Eds.), Yearbook of morphology, 1991. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 109–149.