"Inchoate" and "incipient" are adjectives. Inchoate means just beginning, undeveloped, unorganized. Incipient means "in the initial stages". These two words confuse me. Can they be used interchangeably? Also, if I have new questions in the future, do I make a new subject, or, for example, should I have put this question under "Word Usage"?Thank you once again.
A basic dictionary I just looked up gives 'incipient' as one meaning for inchoate. I tend not to use them interchangeably, though.
For me, inchoate gives the impression of something unformed, without pattern, or perhaps capable of being formed into any pattern - like the chaos which Yahweh turned into heaven and earth. So something inchoate, for me, can be as large as you like, so long as it has no real structure.
Incipient, on the other hand, always seems to me like something growing. It may be as perfectly formed as you like, but it will be small - a bud striving to become a rose. Though of course you can talk of incipient order in chaos. Whoops, am I contradicting myself? Perhaps incipient has a slightly wider range of applications than inchoate - you can probably use incipient in most situation where you'de use inchoate, but not necessarily the other way around.
I realise that these are hardly technical ways of looking at these words (and I'm sure other participants here will do a much better job at clarifying your question), but hey, I though I'd have a crack.
And yes, every time you have a new query, it is considered polite to start a new post.
cheer
the sunshine warrior
Thank You, Shanks. I will just think of inchoate as unformed and incipient as formed in my mind just to clarify things. Your explanation made it easier for me to distinguish the two which make sense to me. I do not need technical, simplicity works very well for me.
daurelie,
I've always thought of inchoate as being more 'archetypal', whereas incipient seems more everyday.
Which I think is agreeing with shanks.
I too found that the difference wasn't as clearcut in the dictionary definitions, although 'formless' and 'formed' (but not quite in existence) sums it up quite well.
Sure I've also seen the words used as follows:
inchoate = "incapable of expression"
incipient = "about to be expressed"
So you could actually talk of a dumbfounded person being inchoate.
But I may have imagined this!
Fisk
along the 'continuum' of:
incapable of being formed ... formless ... about to be formed
inchoate belongs leftish and incipient at the far right
a dumbfounded person will initially be speechless, and when attempting to speak may become incoherent...
As used e.g. in book reviews, "inchoate" often leaves little hope for further development, whereas "incipient" is more neutral/less judgmental in this respect.
I'm not sure that I entirely agree with you, wseiber. "Inchoate," to me at least, has the connotation that, whilst it is capable of further development, nothing - or not much - has been done in that direction, whilst "incipient" has the connotation that it is unfirmed, but in its first stages of a planned development.
Would this be illustrated by the fact that you can speak of incipient alcolholism, but it is not meaningful to speak of inchoate alcoholism? (Thinking about all the drinking in the lead up to Christmas. Oh dear - so many parties, so little time...)
could the key be that something that is inchoate is unshaped but will be or could be put into shape by somebody, whereas something that is incipient is at the beginning of growing as an independent process (i.e., grow here is an intransitive verb rather than a transitive one).
Bingley
Bingley
You may be on to something here. I see, however, from daurelie's second post to this thread that she has already probably vanished back into the ether, leaving cogitating, masticating and salivating over this topic possibly long after the need has been met!
Also, I wonder whether subtleties of usage can ever really be defined or pinned down. I mean, if the dictionaries can't do it (or don't dare to try), perhaps we too would be wisest to leave some fuzzy areas and explore them as we use them? Or is this just an inchoate idea?
In reply to:
Also, I wonder whether subtleties of usage can ever really be defined or pinned down.
I suspect for most dictionaries the problem may be one of space and purpose rather than ability or inability to make these distinctions. Dictionaries for non-native speakers make more of an effort to show collocations and the limits on what subjects can go with what verbs. Otherwise, as far as quick reference is concerned there is only one's own linguistic intuition supplemented by usage guides to go on. Of course there are corpora, but then they are not very accessible and it takes a lot longer to come to a decision.
Of course this does all raise the issue of which usage guides or which citations in the corpus can be considered authoritative, and whether one takes a prescriptive or descriptive view of language.
Bingley