affixesprefixessuffixes
Does terminology exist for discriminating between words which do/don't contain a prefix/suffix?
How could I describe this difference in the synonyms 'discontinue' and 'stop'? Here, 'dis' is a prefix and 'stop' contains no affix.
More fundamentally, is there a term for words which do not contain other words/affixes as substrings?
I am also curious if a word contains an affix vs another word as a substring, if these are different concepts.
Rupt is better thought of as a word root than as a prefix or a suffix. It comes from Latin.
Rumpere is a Latin stem meaning "to break". From that comes the Latin ruptura, meaning "fracture".
As you noticed, these words are connected in that they all seem to describe something broken.
Here you'll find a more detailed etymology of many words that contain the root.
A masseuse is a female person who gives massages (the male is masseur). The origin of the term is French.
Massage therapist usually implies that the person has undergone some special training in the use of massage to alleviate medical conditions. They are typically licensed or certified in some manner:
How long does it take to become a Massage Therapist? In the U.S, legal minimum hours for obtaining a massage therapy license differ from state to state and range from 330 to 1,000 hours. [CareerExplorer]
A massager is a device that massages.
If you google massager you'll likely find a bunch of objects that vibrate or have knobs on them for being rubbed upon people's bodies.
The suffix -er just implies that it is a noun that performs a certain function. It does not imply that it is a person's profession. For example, an aircraft carrier.
Best Answer
This is an addition to @user2655010's answer as I don't have commenting privileges
According to this definition a root is
a morpheme that underlies an inflectional or derivational paradigm.And since a morpheme is:
any of the minimal grammatical units of a language, each constituting a word or meaningful part of a word, that cannot be divided into smaller independent grammatical partsthen a root would not contain another word or affix