Using Spanish, Latin, and English Cognates in Do-It-Yourself Testing

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

By Robert Oliphant
Columnist EducationNews.org

Civilization is a big vocabulary, often with a bloody history. Modern languages like Spanish and English still bear the etymological scars of countless invasions, military and cultural. According to Fernando Corripio's " Diccionario Etimologico ," Olé ! Is descended from Arabic Allah . According to Webster's New World College Dictionary, 3 rd edition (WNW), Ciao! goes back to Italian schiavo and medieval Latin slavus "slave, Slav." The meanings of words, as Humpty Dumpty reminded Alice , we can bend as we please. But etymologies will always retain a physical identity, very much like family skeletons packed away in a lexicographical closet.

Once exhumed, the physical presence of etymological family relationships helps them to stick in the memory far more forcefully than, say, the arbitrary learn-by-rote link between HIJO and "son." As memory aids, then , etymological relationships can be productively used in vocabulary improvement programs and test questions like the following.

An English-Spanish-Latin-Latinate English Test Question . . . . Each of the accompanying word-groups contains four elements: (1) an English word, (2) a Spanish equivalent, (3) the Latin source for the Spanish word, (4) an English word borrowed from the same source and thus a "cognate" (literally, "co-born) of the Spanish word. In each group one of these four elements is presented in a partial-spelling form in which asterisks replace the omitted letters.

For each word-group please identify the SECOND vowel letter, if any, of the partially spelled word in that group. In making your identification you have four alternatives: (a) A; (b) E; (c) I; (d) O, U, Y, or "none." The correct answers are noted later on.

G1: h***t. . . . corazón. . . . cordis. . . . cardiac .

G2. body . . . . c ** rpo . . . . corpus . . . . corp **.

G3. full . . . . lleno. . . . plenus. . . . pl****.

This test is verifiably based upon a high frequency Spanish word list ( VizEd ) and upon two authoritative dictionaries: Corripo's and Webster's New World College Dictionary, 3 rd edition (WNW). In the interests of flexibility, we can vary the number of letters omitted, and we can change the vowel letter requested from second to first. We can also substitute different English meanings and Latinate English cognates that fit our Spanish-Latin etymological core relationship. Finding Latinate English cognates can be tricky at times. But all in all, most 12-year-olds can handle the challenge quite well with a splendid sense of personal achievement.

Classical Latin versus Spanish . . . . Our etymological approach calls into question the traditional assumption that the study of classical Latin is a practical route to vocabulary growth. In truth, however, many of our Latinate borrowings came to us from the Latin written and spoken by Europeans AFTER the fall of the Roman empire , not during its actual reign. Not surprisingly, then, Latin-source etymologies are identified in WNW not as L (Classical Latin) but as VL (Vulgar Latin), ML (Mediaeval Latin), and LL (Late Latin - including Graeco -Latin).

What these dictionary etymologies tell us is that our planet is still living in an "inkhorn" vocabulary explosion that began in the seventeenth century and continues down to our own day in both English and Spanish. The GRE word list available via http://web.archive.org/web/20060904154449/http://www.supervocabulary.com/, for example, includes words like amalgamate , amortize , apotheosis , appease , arabesque , ascetic , and aseptic , for which Latin sources appear in Corripio and WNW but not in Cassell's Latin-English Dictionary (1987).

To put it bluntly, then, studying modern Spanish with an etymological perspective is a far better route to vocabulary growth than staggering for several years through Caesar, Virgil, and Cicero - especially for those who face the daunting prospect of mastering our Graeco -Latinate medical and scientific vocabularies.

TO CONCLUDE. . . . The central premise of most European language teaching today is that it's better to have a 5,000-word basic vocabulary with bad grammar than a 1,000-word vocabulary with a solid grasp of the subjunctive (some successful teachers even omit the past tense in their programs). And vocabulary learning, as we all know, has always been a brute-force exercise in rote repetition and frustration, especially for older learners.

Precious few words in English have the logical structure of nouns like ROSEBUSH (clearly a bush having something to do with roses). Instead what we largely face are jungle monsters like NOSTALGIA and MIGRAINE for whom etymology offers the reassurance that comes with understanding where they come from, namely, nest + algia (literally, "home sickness") and hemi + cranium (literally, "having to do with one side of the head").

Not all etymological connections will stick in the mind like these two (nobody ever forgets them, I've found). But most of them will sink in strongly enough to impose a little needed order, even pleasure, upon the desperate scribbles of rote memorization vocabulary learning.

As far as our personal-best vocabulary goes. the American dictionary has always been a marvelous do-it-yourself tool, going back to Noah Webster Dictionary of the American Language, which was followed by the first Merriam Webster's unabridged dictionary with etymologies by Leo Weiner and William Torrey Harris as its editor-in-chief, who was at the same time serving as our national commissioner of education (the equivalent of today's Secretary of Education).

From Weiner and Harris on, the American dictionary has always been an arsenal of mental connectedness for us individually, not just an information object gathering dust on a bookshelf. Information objects and information services are certainly important elements in our lives today. But what's in our own heads is even more important, especially if we can access it when we need it. For Plato (in Cratylus ) etymologies were useful. And they still are.

Some years back the great lexicographer Herbert Dean Meritt told me that "great ideas come and go, but people are always interested in a good etymology." At the time I felt he was a bit cynical. Now, though, I feel he was dead right, wholesomely so.

[NOTE: The correct answers to the test questions are G1: a (A), G2: b (E), G3: d (Y )