Long ago, far from our New World, a great warrior civilization lived and died. Throughout the ancient world, they built roads, made laws, and wrote literature. Today, their great buildings have crumbled to dusty ruin, but echoes of their words are still heard because the English language (and others such as Spanish) uses parts of their language, Latin.
The vanished civilization, of course, was Rome, Italy, and Rome rose to power over 2,000 years ago, which is more than twenty centuries. Only 500 years ago, astonished Europeans discovered that there was an inhabited New World on the back side of the earth, and after three centuries of early conflict and exploration, a new nation - as Abraham Lincoln put it - was conceived on this continent.
In about 200 years since, this new nation - the United States - has developed a new kind of English, which is a combination of Roman Latin, ancient Greek, German Anglo-Saxon, American Indian, and many other languages. But with all of these influences Latin, the language of ancient Rome, is still the most important source of English words.
This year we will learn about our own language by learning about the Latin remnants inside it. Remnants? Yes, many of our words are made of two or three pieces of Latin. We sometimes call these pieces "prefixes and suffixes," but we will just call them Stems. The stem "sub," for example is part of many English words. "Sub" means under, and we find it in words like submarine, submerge, and subtract. We also find sub in harder words such as subterranean, subordinate, substantial, and even subterfuge. Even though words like these seem hard at first, the truth is that they are not as hard as they look - if you know the Latin stems. The word subterranean, for example, is only a combination of sub (under) and terr (earth/land). A cave, in other words, is subterranean because it is underground!
So most of what we call big words or hard words are really not so difficult after all, if you know the Latin Stems that are in them. Each time you learn one easy Stem, you have learned an important part of dozens of English words; so learning Latin Stems is power-learning since you only have to study one small word-part in order to learn dozens of full words.
This year, you will learn a lot of Latin stems. As you learn more and more, you will begin to notice them everywhere you go and in the books you read. You will sometimes hear a word for the very first time, but you will know what it means already because you know all the Latin Stems in it!
~ from Word Within the Word
The vanished civilization, of course, was Rome, Italy, and Rome rose to power over 2,000 years ago, which is more than twenty centuries. Only 500 years ago, astonished Europeans discovered that there was an inhabited New World on the back side of the earth, and after three centuries of early conflict and exploration, a new nation - as Abraham Lincoln put it - was conceived on this continent.
In about 200 years since, this new nation - the United States - has developed a new kind of English, which is a combination of Roman Latin, ancient Greek, German Anglo-Saxon, American Indian, and many other languages. But with all of these influences Latin, the language of ancient Rome, is still the most important source of English words.
This year we will learn about our own language by learning about the Latin remnants inside it. Remnants? Yes, many of our words are made of two or three pieces of Latin. We sometimes call these pieces "prefixes and suffixes," but we will just call them Stems. The stem "sub," for example is part of many English words. "Sub" means under, and we find it in words like submarine, submerge, and subtract. We also find sub in harder words such as subterranean, subordinate, substantial, and even subterfuge. Even though words like these seem hard at first, the truth is that they are not as hard as they look - if you know the Latin stems. The word subterranean, for example, is only a combination of sub (under) and terr (earth/land). A cave, in other words, is subterranean because it is underground!
So most of what we call big words or hard words are really not so difficult after all, if you know the Latin Stems that are in them. Each time you learn one easy Stem, you have learned an important part of dozens of English words; so learning Latin Stems is power-learning since you only have to study one small word-part in order to learn dozens of full words.
This year, you will learn a lot of Latin stems. As you learn more and more, you will begin to notice them everywhere you go and in the books you read. You will sometimes hear a word for the very first time, but you will know what it means already because you know all the Latin Stems in it!
~ from Word Within the Word
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