self

Unlike most roots in this collection, self is not Latin or Greek — it is native English to the bone. It comes from Old English self / seolf, from Proto-Germanic *selbaz, the same ancestor that gives German selbst and Dutch zelf. Its meaning has barely moved in over a thousand years: 'one's own person, one's own being.'

What makes self remarkable is that it builds words in two completely different grammatical jobs.

Job 1 — the reflexive pronouns (-self / -selves). When the doer of an action and the receiver of the action are the same person, English glues self onto a pronoun: my + self = myself, your + self = yourself, him + self = himself, her + self = herself, it + self = itself, one + self = oneself. 'I hurt myself' means the I and the hurt-receiver are one and the same. The plural simply swaps self for selves: yourselves, ourselves, themselves. These words are everywhere and almost invisible — you use myself dozens of times a day without thinking of self as a 'root' at all.

Job 2 — the productive prefix self-. Here self attaches to the front of a noun, adjective, or participle to mean 'toward / about / by oneself.' This is one of the most generative prefixes in modern English, spinning out hundreds of compounds:

- self- + discipline → self-discipline: discipline you impose on yourself
- self- + defense → self-defense: defending your own person
- self- + restraint → self-restraint: holding your own impulses back
- self- + absorbed → self-absorbed: absorbed in yourself, ignoring others
- self- + assertion → self-assertion: pushing your own views forward
- self- + abasement → self-abasement: lowering yourself

Notice the pattern: in every self- compound, the action turns back on the actor. self-defense is defending yourself, not someone else; self-discipline is discipline aimed inward.

The word selfish comes from the same root: self + -ish ('having the quality of') = 'caring only about your own self.' Coined in the 1600s, it was originally a moralizing insult. Its mirror, unselfish (un- + selfish), means caring about others before yourself.

So the whole family splits cleanly: stick self on the end of a pronoun and you get a reflexive (myself); stick self- on the front of a word and you get a 'toward-oneself' compound (self-discipline). Same little Germanic word, two grammatical lives.