In this submission we offer parents a glimpse into the insights that help our students understand how, with attention to predictable phonetic shifts, Latin word roots enable decoding and using Spanish vocabulary.
Bridging Two (or Three) Languages
D’Evelyn students gain insight into the power of Latin roots when in jr. high English they study The WORD within the WORD. They learn, e.g, that the root -fy means make, that fil- mean thread, corp– means body, bon- means good, and so on. Latin students learn additional vocabulary that has been appropriated by past speakers of English. Two examples featured in my Latin 3 class’s recent discussion of Roman religion. In the realm of the home, we discussed the importance of the focus (hearth), which in the round huts of Rome’s earliest days was in the literal center of the home and was the site of the most fundamental of rituals, the acceptance of a newborn into the family by his father, who picked up the naked child from the ground just beside the focus. We also discussed the pontifex, one of the most important priesthoods of pagan Rome. Literally, the pontifex was the maker (-fex) of bridges (pons, pontis). Figuratively, the pontifex was responsible for securing the goodwill of the gods when the Romans wished to span natural boundaries such as rivers or to create a divinely protected boundary such as the walls of a new city.
When /o/ Becomes /ue/
Many will recognize a trove of derivatives from both focus and pontifex in English: the focal point of a lens, a pontoon bridge, and even the pontiff, a common byword for the Pope as the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Veterans of freshman biology will note that the pons is a structure in the brain which connects the medulla oblongata, cerebellum, and midbrain. But what of the student who seeks to bridge the gap between the phonetic patterns of Latin (and English) and Spanish? There is a real hurdle here, raised by the centuries of evolution which the Latin language underwent in the Iberian peninsula after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. With guidance from their Spanish teachers, however, students come to observe the change from the Latin phoneme /o/ to the Spanish phoneme /ue/. Thus, regarding the roots mentioned above, students easily adjust to these Latin-Spanish-English triads: corpus/cuerpo/ body, bonus/bueno/good, and focus/fuego/hearthfire. Expanding from this pattern, students will also easily cope with fortis/fuerte/strong (think fortify!) and responsum/respuesta/response.
What the Heck Happened to F?
At some point, Spanish students encounter a less obvious phonetic change, that of many instances of the letter –f- into the letter -h-. In many Latin words a breathy –f- lost the initial friction of top teeth on bottom lip, persisting in Spanish just as the puff of air that we recognize as -h-. Students can, with guidance, cope with and anticipate changes such as these, again following the Latin/Spanish/English pattern: fil-/hilo/thread (think filament or moving in single file) , foli-/hoja/leaf (as in foliage or foil, which is metal pounded leaf-thin). Even the very word for “make”, represented by the Latin stems -fac-, -fect-, and –fex, often undergoes the change from -f- to -h-. Witness hacer, which developed from Latin facere, to make, and the participle hecho, meaning “made”. Once informed of these tendencies of phonetic change, students gain an extra tool to swiftly decode Spanish words through their English cognates. This is a bridge to understanding worth the effort to make!
(Published in the November, 2014 Jaguar Tracks)
The PHurrowed Brow 