Etymology transcript

Elaine Stanley:

I just wanted to add these few slides, to add that at the same time as teaching students about each morpheme and its meaning plus its application to words, there are many opportunities that come up to talk about the origin of words as well, so that etymology, which really goes alongside your morphology, and just how different words or even sounds for letter patterns have entered the English language.

I spoke in our last session about discussions you can have with students around why some words they come across are irregular, meaning they don't have the code yet to explain the sounds in the word. Often words are irregular because they've come into English from another language throughout history, in the history of England and things that happened over time. They've come into English from different languages and that's why to us they appear irregular.

Here are some examples that you might come across in the early stages when you're teaching code.

In this first example, we've got three different sounds that ch can make in words. Students first learn that ch makes a /ch/ sound as in those words there, and that's from old English during Anglo-Saxon times. [Slide shows the words child, chin, church.] That's come into English from Germanic languages originally, a long, long time ago in the Middle Ages, and it's the earliest form of the English language.

But then as students learn to read and spell more words, they'll start to realise – and we've also got it in our progression – the three different sounds as well, that ch can also make a /k/ sound, so you can have discussions with them that the origin of the /k/ sound for ch is actually a Greek origin, and that came in over time into English through the Greek language. [Slide shows the words chemist, stomach, character.]

Also, when ch says, /sh/, that's a French origin. [Slide shows the words Charlotte, machine, chef.] Students get really interested in this. They love learning about the origin of sounds and words.

Again, here you often come across after they've learned quite a bit of the code, especially when you get to the soft sound for g or c, they often come across words where y will be in the middle of a word and make a different sound. In a closed-syllable word where a vowel –and y counts as one here – is followed by a consonant or more consonants, it's going to make its short sound. It's closed in by consonants after it. So that's from Greek origin when y makes an /ĭ/ sound. [Slide shows the words gym, system, crystal.]

And also in an open-syllable word, so there's no consonant after the y in the syllable, it will make a long ‘i’ [ī] sound in those words. [Slide shows the words cycle, type, hyphen.]

They're both of Greek origin when you come across those two sounds.

The soft g and c sounds, which we teach in our progression – most people will teach that probably around Grade 1 as part of the code – it's really interesting to give this extra bit of information to tell students that that came into English, those two soft sounds for g and c, around the time of the Norman invasion in 1066 in England, when French started to be adopted in England. It was after the first Norman king ruled England. It's just really interesting to tie it to the history and when we started to have those sounds come in.

At that time as well, the upper classes in England liked to adopt some of those French words that were coming in because they sounded more sophisticated. We still have a lot of synonyms in English where we've got the simple word, which would be the Anglo-Saxon word, and then the more sort of sophisticated synonym for the word was French origin that came in as well at that time.

You'll find when you start teaching this, you start to have more and more of those conversations and students are really interested in learning all of that as well.