Where is the root morpheme in the Modern English word "absent"?

I can't say whether the root morpheme in "absent" is "ab-" or "abs-". (From an etymological point of view, ab- appears to be a negative prefix -- from M.Fr. absent (O.Fr. ausent), from L. absentem (nom. absens), prp. of abesse "be away from, be absent" -- from O.Fr. absence, from L. absentia, noun of state from absentem (nom. absens), prp. of abesse "be away from, be absent," from ab- "away" + esse "to be").

On the one hand, "absent" may be analyzed and compared with "present" (pre-/ ab- sent), but in this case it's clear that we can't consider -s- as a common root for those semantically related words, because it doesn't seem to be the lexical core of these words at all. On the other hand in the case of "abnormal" and "normal" this negative prefix ab- is easily identified.

Solution 1:

Interesting question with an interesting answer. I understand what @subic is trying to get at. Taken from Dictionary.com, here is the etymology of "absent":

1350–1400; Middle English < Latin absent- (stem of absēns, present participle of abesse to be away ( ab- ab- + -s- be ( see is) + -ent- -ent))

@subic, were you wondering over the 's'? Well, I looked up further, and I realised why the 's' was there at all. From Wiktionary:

From Middle French absent < Old French ausent < Latin absent-, the stem of absens, present participle of abesse (“to be away from”), formed from ab + esse (“to be”).

Note that "abesse" as you said was the original word, but the Latin word is "absent-", whose root is "absens". IT was here, that 's' first got stuck in. Why? I looked up the Latin absens, and I got this:

Present active participle of absum (“be away from, absent”)

So, absens came from absum, so I looked up absum, and I found this:

From ab (“from”) + sum (“be”).

The 's' originally came from 'sum', and along with all the deriving and everything, remained there, as it was derived from 'absum'. In fact, if you looked up "abesse", you would find that it is actually a derivative of "absum"!

So, the thing that is confusing, is abesse, which is actually a :

present active infinitive of absum

So, I hope that answered your questions.

Solution 2:

I am not sure what the issue is here.

ab- indicates from or away, while prae- shortened to pre- indicates before or already.

In absent and present, -sent represents the present participle indicating being.

In abnormal, ab- has a similar indication. I would accept that extraordinary has a similar suggested meaning but is often more positive; that is just usage.

Solution 3:

IMHO Not every word will have root 'word' so-to-speak. There are root letters. As in the word absent. ab=prefix -ent=suffix. Root seems 'to be' S which is a picture of DNA. Take the word essence. Esse is the root word however, the ES-SE should give you some indication that this is double SS. Two strands of DNA.

These are letters which are pictures to represent concepts. That is what the alphabet is. Let us not forget this. Take the word interpreter for example. What is the root word? In-t-er-pre-t-er. T and T are the root letters. Everything else is a prefix or suffix. T is relative to the sun at winter solstice. So yes, absent would have a root letter of S. S begins words like soul, sol, spirit, sense, space, sentient, science, safe, slight, slope, solute and sad (there are more of course).

Absent when taking only as that one word and not with all of our relations we attach to it already when thinking of examples, must be taken into context when trying to figure out what the word all by itself is trying to tell us.

Someone mentioned -mit (submit), which is based off of the root letters MT, which make up Ma'at (which is order), math (definitely related to Ma'at), might, mitigate and so on.