We spent a good bit of time in the last chapter talking about language families and the kinds of similarities to look for among them. We also talked about the use of imagination to help you make connections between English words and their foreign counterparts.
In this chapter I want to show you another fundamental fact about languages that will greatly simplify your memory task. It is this: every language builds its complex words from the simple basic word roots of that language. This means the difficulty of learning strange and unrelated words will come mainly at the beginning, when everything is new to you. But as you begin to get hundreds, or even a thousand, words under your belt you will start noticing that an increasing proportion of the subsequent new words you learn are based on the roots of the basic words you have already learned.
When you think about it, this makes sense. Primitive human beings painstakingly and gradually created new sounds, new words, as the need arose. They needed clearly distinguishable words for every new object—basic things like “fire, water, wood, food,” and so forth. But as people needed to expand their language and create more sophisticated concepts they drew on many of the existing roots of the language as their basis for creating new words. Every language does this. As these new words were created, each language developed certain rough patterns for the creation of new vocabulary. In other words, each language has its own distinctive characteristics for generating new words.
Your job is to figure out how the language you're studying actually works, and how it generates its new words. You won't have to analyze the pattern on your own—your teacher and your text can help you to do that. You need only be aware that there is a system and pattern your language uses to “invent” new words. It's an irregular and not fully predictable pattern—but it's a pattern.
To help you get the idea, let's take a look at how we do it in English. In English we can sometimes make up new words from basic Germanic roots largely by putting simple endings on them.
- From the adjective “dark” we create the verb “darken.”
- From the adjective “quick” we create the verb “quicken.”
- From the adjective “bright” we create the verb “brighten.”
- From the noun “strength” we create the verb “strengthen.”
Get the pattern? You can see that English has a system—they never teach it in school—that let's you make verbs out of some words by adding “-en”. So if you were an Indonesian learning English you might have to struggle to learn the word “bright” the first time you saw it. But you would be very quick to learn the verb “brighten” once you had learned “bright.” On the other hand, the pattern doesn't always work. We can't say “smallen” from “small” or “greenen” from “green”, even if we can say “redden” from “red”. Languages develop from human social usage, not from computers or mathematicians or professors.
We also have thousands of words that are combinations of root words: book-bag, doorknob, icebreaker, fishburger, windbreaker, eyewash, dogfood, candlestick. Or words extending from simpler roots such as life: lively, living, liven, live, lifeless.
These are simple examples of word-building which English has retained from the old Germanic system. But most of our word building comes from using the French/Latin system. For example, we use the old Anglo-Saxon “write” in our every day language about writing: write, writer, re-write, writings, etc. But when we want to create more complex, abstract words related to the idea of “writing” we turn to the Latin root “scribe”—which is just the everyday Latin root for “write.” And we add Latin prefixes. So we end up with a whole series of different words for more complex concepts that come from the simple idea of writing:
inscribe which means literally to “write into.”
describe which means literally to “write about.”
subscribe which means literally to “write under”
or “sign up to”, or “underwrite” in the sense that “I subscribe to that idea.”
prescribe which means literally to “write first” or “write in the beginning” in the sense of writing authoritatively, such as a medicine is “prescribed” to a patient.
proscribe which means literally “write forward”, publicize it, or forbid it.
transcribe which means literally “write across”, from one system to another, such as transcribe shorthand notes into regular writing.
conscribe which means literally “write together with”, such as writing names with other names on a list for conscription. ascribe which means literally “write to” or “write toward”, such as ascribing a certain characteristic to someone.
In German, or Russian, or most other languages, this process is less mystifying, because it's more self-contained. They use their own everyday word for “write” and add on their own prefixes to create roughly the same abstract words like “subscribe, transcribe, prescribe” etc., unlike our use of foreign roots and foreign prefixes.
-So in German, using the word schreiben—to write, we get
zuschreiben—to ascribe; zu=to
einschreiben—to register; ein=in
vorschreiben—to prescribe; vor=first, before
ausschreiben—to advertise, write out; aus=out
aufschreiben—to write down; auf=on, onto
umschreiben—to transcribe; um=around, about
beschreiben—to describe; be=to cause
By the way, did you happen to notice the similarity between “scribe” in Latin and “schreiben” in German? It's not by accident. Both are Indo-European languages and happen to share this root word.
In Russian, using the regular Russian word pisat'—to write, we get:
opisat'—to describe; o=about
perepisat'—rewrite; pere=over
podpisat'—to subscribe; pod=under
pripisat'—to ascribe; pri=to
nadpisat'—to inscribe; nad=above, over
vypisat'—to write out, prescribe; vy=out
zapisat'—to write down, register; za=down
Now you can see how words are built up. Once you learn the basic word, you can spot how the more complex words are created from it. Of course, you still have to study the word to learn it. No system is fully predictable and each has lots of irregularities. But the learning process becomes much easier when you have something to hang your memory on. And most Indo-European languages employ this system of combining basic roots and prefixes to create more complex concepts.
Let's remember that English is a living language. The meanings of a lot of our words have evolved over time. So they don't all have quite the same literal meaning that they started out with. A word like “manufacture” literally means “hand-made”: manu—hand and, facture—made; because in the old days when you manufactured something you made it by hand. But you can see that the basic principle of the word is still there. And a knowledge of how to dissect these words will help you learn them—especially if you were starting to learn English as a foreign language.
The point is that words are not just a complicated set of meaningless syllables that have a certain arbitrary meaning attached to them. A language grows, organically, like a tree. So it's natural for words to be related to one other and built from each other. We don't make up some meaningless new sound and give it a meaning. We almost always work from existing words to create new ones.
If an American or British scientist invents some kind of new machine, you can bet that he won't decide to call it a gropsmaflupyim. Why? Because that's not English, nor does it even look like English. Just because he invented it doesn't really give him the right to make up a name out of the blue. Why not? He's breaking the rule that you make up new words out of existing roots of the language. Furthermore, nobody would ever remember the name. It would hardly be on the road to commercial success. But if he called it a transtactomorpholator, you'd immediately accept it as English, even though I just made the word up out of Latin and Greek roots used in English.
Remember: every language will have some sort of word-building system. Look for it. After all, if there weren't some kind of a system, kids wouldn't be able to learn their own language either.
1. Every language builds the complex words from the simple basic root words of that language.
2. After you learn several hundred words or more you will start noticing familiar roots creeping back into your vocabulary lists in new forms.
3. Eventually, the vast proportion of new vocabulary in your new language will be based on roots you already know.