Deciphering vocabulary via roots
Learning the meaning of new words and learning how to use them is irritating. Among my students, it is the second least popular task below grammar. There are many ways to remember things. Personally, I enjoy finding words within existing words and like to picture how various words are interconnected. Given that most European languages have their roots in Latin and Greek, learning cognates can be interesting and fun. Especially if you enjoy learning about the stories behind words and their history.
Here is a common approach, if you ever see a repetition of a set of letters in certain European words, they’re probably words from either Latin or Greek. Once you know these root words, you will be able to guess or infer the meaning of the word from the surrounding context. For example:
“The flying birds ruptured the hot air balloon.”
We know that birds and the hot air balloon had an encounter. But what kind of encounter? Well, let’s take a look -Latin word: rupt – to break or burst. So rupt can be translated to burst and now you have an idea of what happened in this unfortunate scenario. This is just a simple example of how a little knowledge of Latin or Greek can go a long way.
Another example is report – re means again, port means carry. Now carry again with context:
‘The man reported the events as they happened.’
You can understand the sense of what it means to carry again something that has happened.
Lets look at some other derivative words.
Corrupt – from corruptus – Com was changed to cor which means together. So it literally means ‘break together‘.
Erupt – From eruptus – to burst/to break out
Interrupt – From interruptus – inter means between/among/during + rupt – to break. So literally ‘ break between/during/among.
Disrupt – From disruptus – dis – apart + rupt – to break. So literally ‘break apart‘.
I advise the reader to be aware of a couple of issues. The first is that the meaning of words change over time, so although a word may be loosely linked to a root word it does not mean that the root word’s meaning is wholly relevant or useful to inferring the meaning of the word.
So now, even if you don’t know the word, you know that any word containing rupt is mostly to be something about breaking or bursting something, you can infer the rest of the meaning from context. Of course, this approach has its limitations, for example, let’s take the word ‘corrupt’ – com (which means ‘together’), over time, changed to cor so literally break together. The meaning of the word corrupt, from the Latin word corruptus, which means to spoil, bribe and ruin, cannot be clearly inferred by the reader by merely knowing the meaning of the word rupt.
If you want to go further down the etymological rabbit hole visit https://www.etymonline.com/ and discover the roots of your favourite English words.