Teaching Derivatives 1
How do you help students expand their English vocabulary by making connections to our language’s Latin roots?
I’ve taken two approaches to this task over the years, and I’m not certain which method I prefer, or which seems to more evidently benefit my students. At first, I focused solely on the derivatives themselves. With each chapter, I would introduce a short list of English words usually derived from specific words in their most recent list of new Latin vocabulary. Occasionally, I would include a few derivatives not related to the words on that list, or even taken from Greek, if they seemed apt; since, for instance, among the derivatives from a list of Latin words for body-parts, we learned “sanguine,” I felt it appropriate to include the other terms derived from the humors — “melancholy,” “phlegmatic,” and “choleric.” Along with the definition, we’d discuss the origin of each word, how the meaning of the Latin or Greek root connects to the meaning of the English derivative, and how to best use the word in a sentence.
Recently, however, my colleagues and I have started to focus more on the roots, rather than individual derivatives. Again drawing from their recent vocabulary, we explore Latin words which have been especially productive, such as “aqua” or “servare” or “de.” We first ask the students to identify as many English words as they can that are derived from each root (thus, from “de,” we would get “describe,” “detect,” “descend”). We then might add a few more derivatives to the list, and discuss the relationship of these words to their roots.
What we hoped to achieve by looking more closely at the roots was that, if a student were to see a word derived from Latin with which he or she were unfamiliar, that student would be better able to divine its meaning by recognizing at least one of its components — that a student who sees the verb “excogitate” could determine that it pertains to thinking by recalling “cogitare.” However, I fear that, by focusing heavily on roots that have each given us multiple English words, we’re missing out on the great “one-hit wonders” — such as “vicissitude,” “scurrilous,” and “defenestrate” (though I think, this year, I might have filed that one under “de,” as no Latin student should ever graduate without knowing what might be the greatest word in the English language). A thorough knowledge of Latin roots is also not going to be of much assistance in deducing the meaning of more than a few words. I would be incredibly surprised if a student could adequately explain the concept of “mortmain” solely by recognizing its derivation from “mortuus” and “manus.”
I’d love to hear what approaches others use with derivatives, but, in the meantime — since we’re talking about Latin’s connections to a modern language — here’s a link to a project that we created for our Latin I students, in which they have to research another language of the Indo-European family, and compare it to Latin, English, and the major Romance languages.