Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
I'm making sense of the structure of this word now. Sometimes the meaning can help me understand the structure, but the structure can also help me with the meaning. Although we lay out these four questions in a linear manner to process, their influence on the word's orthography is more recursive.
The suffix <-ent> is often found on bases when an adjectival form is needed. We can see this on words like persistent or different. This isn't always the case, however, as we see with student or president.
trucul + ent
I'm seeing another possibility here. I know two other potential suffixes that might be present here: <-ule> and <-cule>.
truc + ule/ + ent
tru + cule/ + ent
That slash mark is to indicate that I'll need to replace that truculent.
In fact, I would also need to do that with the base in my first hypothesis as well:
truce/ + ule/ + ent
The pattern of a single vowel by a single consonant in the base would prompt doubling
*trucculent
Since this is not the case, I must assume the base contains an
But in both hypotheses, I'm wondering, is the word related to true, truth, and truce? It certainly doesn't seem to have a connection to truck.
Let's look at the entry in Etymonline to guide us with the root of this word. Knowing the root of a word can help us determine its base in Modern English. Words like fierce and savage greet us right away. These are great synonyms to consider when working on the first question. It appears our root is from Latin trux, where it means the same. Then Douglas, the creator of Etymonline, gives us the genitive form of this Latin adjective. The genitive form is what we will need to determine our English base.
When going from a Latin noun or adjective to an English base, we remove the genitive suffix, &amp;amp;lt;-is&amp;amp;gt; from trucis, and there we arrive at
