Timeline for What do native speakers think of word roots?
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25 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 8, 2017 at 15:44 | comment | added | JDługosz | <<If I asked a native speaker what algophobia meant>> Fear of the 45th Vice President? | |
| Jul 2, 2016 at 11:57 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @TBridges42 First, I think you mean declension (or the act of declining), not declination. Declination (or downdrift) is the tendency of the pitch to fall near the end of the sentence/utterance, which is entirely unrelated. Second, pollution from pollute is not declension as such—it’s derivation. Pollute, pollutes, polluted, polluting would be conjugating, while pollution, pollutions would be declining. You’re absolutely right, though, that there’s a fundamental difference between transparent derivation like this and (more or less) opaque Graeco-Latin derivation. | |
| Mar 8, 2016 at 8:40 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | Eli Skolas, that's what I'm talking about: memorization of words themselves, rather than roots. They may come from spelling lists or from received oral communication. | |
| Mar 8, 2016 at 8:31 | comment | added | Eli Skolas | @DavidRicherby And did you always already know the meaning of every word on your spelling lists, or did you have to look some of them up? (Or did the teachers provide context as well as the word?) MANY students increase their vocabulary from spelling drills – my 9 year old son is asking me about roughly one and half new words per week from his lists. And in his case, English IS a second language! | |
| Jul 30, 2015 at 14:01 | comment | added | TBridges42 | There's also a big difference between determining a meaning by its compound roots, like algophobia from algo- and -phobia, which is a high school/college activity for most native speakers, and determining that pollute and pollution are related, which is a form of declination. | |
| Jul 30, 2015 at 13:57 | comment | added | TBridges42 | Root based learning is a terribly poor way to learn basic conversational English, as you would spend most of your time learning a confusing web of Anglo, Saxon, proto-Germanic and Old French which mix with little rhyme or reason. Most native speakers learn through picture books or through listening to and copying others. Both are forms of rote learning. Determining what a word means by its roots is a form of synthesis, and an inherently higher level form of learning. It is most appropriate to technical terms that were consciously created from Greek or Latin roots. | |
| Jul 28, 2015 at 8:09 | comment | added | Nagora | I am a native speaker of English and I never learnt any new words by any method other than rote memorization until I was into secondary school. We may have learnt different forms of words by reference to a root (run/running/runs) but that's not the same thingand even that example shows the problem with the root system if we continue into "ran". "go/going/went"; "drive/driving/dove/driven" etc. English is full of traps for root-based learning. I well remember taking home long lists of words to memorize from primary school, and being tested on them the next day. I am 50 years old, BTW. | |
| Jul 28, 2015 at 5:51 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | The root structure of English is simply too ambiguous for this to work very well. Do you think that children generally associate defer, Lucifer, infer, referral, and prefer as having similar meanings? If children learned by roots, wouldn't terrain vs. terror be particularly problematic, or explain vs. complain? Explaining and complaining are very much separate activities--associating them with some abstract root would be more harmful than helpful. | |
| Jul 28, 2015 at 5:50 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | I was thinking more of the base vocabulary. Although vocabulary growth seems to slow as speakers move into adulthood (testyourvocab.com/blog/2013-05-10-Summary-of-results), there is a lot more adulthood than childhood, so perhaps people learn more words as adults. I have no doubt that roots are very helpful in memorizing these words, many of which are probably of Latin or Greek origin. But when it comes to base vocabulary, I strongly suspect that people pick up words individually, as Pinker suggests, rather than learning roots and generalizing. | |
| Jul 28, 2015 at 5:40 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | Alas, I do not have a source, merely personal experience and observation. If you are an adult, you might learn words in any which way. But children seem to pick up words as individual entities, rather than generalizing from roots. This has little relation to learning to read, whether by phonics or some other method, since syllables often are not in direct correspondence with roots. | |
| Jul 28, 2015 at 5:38 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | How old are you, Kevin? | |
| Jul 28, 2015 at 5:36 | comment | added | Kevin Krumwiede | Do you have a source for the claim that native speakers don't learn most words by memorizing roots? I find that hard to believe because I find learning and recognizing roots extremely useful, not only for remembering how to spell and pronounce words, but for determining the meanings of unfamiliar words that I encounter. Your claim reminds me of the (once popular, now debunked) idea that children don't benefit from learning phonics because people recognize whole words when reading. | |
| Jul 28, 2015 at 1:57 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | It is precisely Pinker's definition that I am following, David Richerby. That is what I mean--that a child does not generally see the connection between "return" and "turn." They learned the words separately, in separate situations. Of course I did not mean to imply that a two-year-old sits down with the OED and starts memorizing words alphabetically! | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 23:07 | comment | added | David Richerby | @EliSkolas For spelling, sure. But the question here is about vocabulary. | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 22:29 | comment | added | Todd Wilcox | I created this account to suggest some nuance to your first sentence: most people do not use roots to learn new words, but some certainly do, including me, my parents, my brother, and my best friend. Etymology has been dinner table discussion in my family as long as I can remember, and I have used roots on several occasions to understand the meanings of words the first time I heard them many times. As a (fairly poor) student of Japanese, I use etymology to help me understand Japanese words also. | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 21:44 | comment | added | Eli Skolas | @DavidRicherby You say that you "don't recall ever sitting down with a list of words in [your] native language and learning them." Hells bells, man! When you were in grade school didn't you have daily or weekly lists of "spelling words" that you had to swot up for quizzes? If that's not "rote memorization" then I don't know what is! | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 21:03 | comment | added | David Richerby | @CroadLangshan I think we might be interpreting "learn by rote" in a different way. To me, the phrase means, essentially, sitting down with a list of words and learning them; Pinker (and perhaps Jonah, too) seems to use the term to mean that one just has to learn that, for example, "cat" means the miaowing thing and "dog" means the barking thing, since those are essentially arbitrary and can't be inferred from any rules. | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 20:57 | comment | added | user9910 | Back in grade school (rural Wisconsin - late 70s, early 80s) I recall watching Wordsmith as part of the school day. "Each 15-minute episode focuses on a related group of word cells, most of which derive from the ancient Greek and Latin languages" -- so part of education for a certain portion of the population was indeed memorizing word roots. | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 20:51 | comment | added | Croad Langshan | @DavidRicherby I can't fit a book in this comment. If I remember correctly, Steven Pinker's "Words and Rules" is all about this sort of thing. | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 20:40 | comment | added | David Richerby | @CroadLangshan Well, I don't recall ever sitting down with a list of words in my native language and learning them. Do you? | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 20:36 | comment | added | Croad Langshan | @DavidRicherby I guess whole books / careers / research programs have been dedicated to that kind of question! | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 20:28 | comment | added | David Richerby | @CroadLangshan I may have misread that -- thanks for pointing it out. However, I strongly dispute the claim that native speakers learn anything by rote memorization. | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 20:17 | comment | added | Croad Langshan | @DavidRicherby In those first two sentences: "First, I think I would say that native speakers do not learn most words by memorizing roots. The most common vocabulary is acquired by rote memorization in the first 12 years or so of life.", "root" is not the same as "rote". So there is no contradiction. | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 19:59 | comment | added | David Richerby | Your first two sentences flatly contradict each other. Did you mean to say something else? | |
| Jul 27, 2015 at 17:13 | history | answered | Obie 2.0 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |