LING150/University of Oregon

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1.1.1. Sources of English words

1.1.2. Learning new vocabulary

English has an enormous number of words -- far more than any other language. All English words come from one of two sources: they are either native to English, or they have been borrowed from some other language. Borrowed words can be further subdivided into

1. words borrowed from the Classical languages, Latin and Greek; and,
2. words borrowed from languages other than Latin and Greek.

Native words have been a part of English for as long as it has existed as a separate language. They can be traced back to the core language which certain Germanic peoples, the Anglos and the Saxons, brought with them to England over fifteen hundred years ago. (We'll talk more about this in Unit 4.) Native words are the short, simple words which all English speakers use in ordinary everyday situations.

Native words tend to fall into five major classes. Here are some examples:

body parts	foot, mouth, thumb
family relationships / kinship terms	father, brother, mother
everyday, natural objects	rock, house, hill
physical acts	think, drive, ride
physical characteristics	red, cold, young

Notice that native words often name concrete objects or properties of the physical world -- exactly the kinds of things that people need to talk about when they are engaged in the activities of everyday life. It's not surprising that these words are the first words English-speaking children learn. In fact, if you learned English as a child, you had probably acquired most of your native vocabulary words by the time you were six.

Borrowed words came into English after it had become a separate language. Take a look at the chart below, which shows the sources of English vocabulary based on the frequency of the word in the language as a whole.

Notice that if we consider only the most frequent words in English, we find they are overwhelmingly native words (about 70 percent). But when we consider all the words in an English dictionary, we find that the vast majority (about 75) are borrowed! English speakers borrow lots of words, but they don't use them very often.

English speakers have borrowed words from hundreds of other languages. However, they have borrowed especially large numbers of words from the Classical Languages, Latin and Greek, and from French. (French evolved directly from Latin, so words borrowed from French and Latin often contain the same word roots.) These words tend to be used most frequently in academic and technical vocabulary. When students enter an advanced field of study, they suddenly have to abandon the native Anglo-Saxon words that they use everyday and learn a whole new set of words. Students sometimes say these words "look like Greek," and in fact, they often are Greek (or Latin or French). For example, an dental student must learn to say "odontalgia" (borrowed from Greek) rather than "toothache," a native word meaning the same thing.

English has borrowed words from every culture it has had contact with. We'll call these miscellaneous borrowings "exotic words." Here are some examples of exotic borrowings and their source languages:

Arabic	zero, algebra, candy, ghoul
Algonquian (Native American)	woodchuck
Australian aborigine	boomerang, kangaroo
Chinese	ketchup, typhoon, wok
Gaelic (Irish)	galore, hooligan, whiskey
Hindi	swastika, khaki, pajamas
Italian	bizarre, spaghetti, soprano
Nahuatl (Aztec)	tomato, chocolate

Many dictionaries provide information about a word's origins (or its etymology). Below are examples of the four major classes of words we have discussed. Compare them with your own dictionary. Dictionaries often differ somewhat in the completeness of the word histories they provide. For this class, use one of the recommended dictionaries.

Native words	Example: wolf
Latin words	Example: motion
Greek words	Example: morpheme
Exotic words	Example: sherbet

1.1.2. Learning new vocabulary

How can students increase their vocabulary in order to meet the demands of advanced education? There are really only three ways: these are absorption, memorization, and analysis.

Absorption means that you learn words without conscious effort simply by being immersed in a language situation where the words you want to acquire are being used. This is the most natural way to learn, and the way you learned your first language as a child. It is the easiest way to learn and the knowledge you acquire this way will endure the longest. It is certainly the best way to learn words. Unfortunately, it takes a very long time to acquire an adequate vocabulary this way. You might need to spend years reading good literature and scholarly articles!

Memorization means that you sit down with a list of words and their meanings and learn them by rote. You've probably done this before; how many of those words do you still remember? The problem with memorization is that information learned this way is easily forgotten. It also takes a lot of conscious effort and is incredibly boring. Besides that, in a single 10-week term, you'd probably only learn about 3,000 words.

There is a better method, the method we'll use in this class. It's called analysis.

An Apache speaker once observed linguists working on his language and remarked, "they break apart our language into little pieces and learn the pieces." This is exactly what we'll be doing with the words English has borrowed from Latin and Greek. We'll learn how to break words into pieces, then figure out the meanings of the pieces, and finally, use those meanings to determine the meaning of the word.

The analysis method is an extremely efficient way of expanding your vocabulary. The same pieces, or word roots, are used over and over in English words. If you learn to recognize the roots that make up those big, academic words, you can figure out something about a word even if you've never seen it before.

This analysis method does require some memorization; the word roots need to be memorized by rote. But by memorizing less than 300 roots, you will have some knowledge of about half of the English borrowed vocabulary, i.e. about 300,000 words. This is a fairly good payoff for a modest amount of effort.

In this class, we will be studying word roots from Latin (or French) and Greek only; we won't be able to analyze words borrowed from other languages. Exotic words often can be analyzed by linguists; for example, the word "Mississippi" was borrowed from Ojibwa (pronounced oh-JIB-way), a Native American language spoken around Lake Superior. It can be divided into the roots Missi / ssippi which literally mean 'great river'. Although this is interesting, it's not a big help in developing English vocabulary because there are very few (three or four) Ojibwa words in English. We also won't be analyzing native words; they are far too old to be analyzable using the techniques we'll be learning in this class. Our first goal in learning word analysis will be to learn to recognize words from the four different sources we have discussed.

Copyright 1998 by the Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon.