it's bugging me to know how all the seemingly arbitrary, both grammatical and word-formation, particles came to be. eg marking for case, tense (i know some past tense endings come from auxiliary verbs merged into the main verb), prepositions (i heard claims they come from relation nouns), ect; also suffixes like the latin '-ista' (proffesion), '-ensis' (origin) etc.. did they used to be independent words anytime in the past?
in my native Polish, eg, the word for 'he' is 'on', and it's said to come from *onъ, 'that (one)','the one over there'; as in obsolete 'onegdaj', 'in those times' ('gdy' means 'when' today).
i know some of them are indeed arbitrary; still i'd like to understand how such random affixation was possible in the past but isn't today anymore.
so what i'd like to get are some links to resources on how what are now arbitrary morphemes came to be, no matter what langauge.
non-rootword morphemes origin resources?
Re: non-rootword morphemes origin resources?
What you're asking about is basically grammaticalization -- the evolution of lexical words into grammatical markers, and separate grammatical markers into bound grammatical morphemes (clitics and affixes). So I'd suggest searching with that keyword (as well as its variants, grammaticization, grammatization, plus variants with -s- instead of -z-; I've also seen morphologization used).
(One note: it's not true that "such random affixation was possible in the past but isn't today anymore" -- grammaticalization is still ongoing, in every language. Take the common example of English "let's", which originally just meant "allow us to...", but now serves as a hortative marker. Furthermore, in some jocular situations or when addressing children or being condescending, it's possible to use "let's" with subjects other than first person plural, e.g. "let's eat your peas!" said to one's child. Finally, in some cases in rapid speech "let's" can be further eroded phonologically to a prefix [s]- on the verb: 's'go for "let's go". So here we have the recent [indeed, still ongoing] evolution of an English hortative marker from an independent phrase.)
(One note: it's not true that "such random affixation was possible in the past but isn't today anymore" -- grammaticalization is still ongoing, in every language. Take the common example of English "let's", which originally just meant "allow us to...", but now serves as a hortative marker. Furthermore, in some jocular situations or when addressing children or being condescending, it's possible to use "let's" with subjects other than first person plural, e.g. "let's eat your peas!" said to one's child. Finally, in some cases in rapid speech "let's" can be further eroded phonologically to a prefix [s]- on the verb: 's'go for "let's go". So here we have the recent [indeed, still ongoing] evolution of an English hortative marker from an independent phrase.)