Teach Secondary Issue 14.3

DICTIONARY DEEP DIVE Join David Voisin on a rich, and sometimes surprising journey through the points at which literacy, language and vocabulary intersect... SAME ROOT, DIFFERENTWORDS PARDON MY FRENCH The word ‘ chef ’ originates from the French for ‘head’. It’s a term rarely used in the anatomic sense though, apart from the French ‘ couvre-chef ’ (head gear). Capital punishment – such as ‘decapitation’ – comes from the Latin word ‘ capita ’, meaning head. The guillotine, however, is an eponym, stemming from the name of French physician Joseph Ignace Guillotin, who militated for a more humane means of execution than the vulgar axe. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS Our coccyx and habit of getting goosebumps are both vestigial remnants of our evolutionary past, back when we had tails and used fur to thermoregulate and appear menacing to predators.What’s not changed is that we remain pattern seeking mammals, which is what’s enabled us to understand how our greatest invention – language – has similarly evolved. In linguistics, Grimm’s law demonstrates how many modern languages share common characteristics dating back to around six millennia ago, which linguists call ‘Proto-Indo- European’. A trained eye can spot interesting patterns, even where words look seemingly different.Words beginning with ‘P’ in Latin or Greek tend to start with ‘F’ in English (see ‘paternal’ / ‘pisces’ vs ‘father’ / ‘fish’). Latin languages thus give us ‘ père ’ and ‘ padre ’, whereas Germanic languages give us the German ‘ Vater ’ and Dutch ‘ vader ’. In French, accents will often indicate that a letter ‘S’ has disappeared, (cf. ‘étudiant’ vs ‘student’ vs ‘estudiante’). Many words starting with ‘st’ or ‘sp’ in English will start with ‘E’ in French or Spanish. Consider ‘ étranger ’ and ‘ épice ’ – the French words for ‘stranger’ and ‘spice’. This becomes even more obvious with the circumflex accent (guess the English for ‘ forêt ’, ‘ hôpital ’ and ‘ îles ’). Studying other European languages – dead or modern – is a great way of acquiring a sharp morphological awareness and a better understanding of the ossature of our own language. TEACHING TIP: A QUESTION OF TIME Think of a city – any city will do. In an essay about free will, a philosopher once quipped that our ‘freedom to choose’ is entirely predicated on our knowledge, both learned and experienced. Unless you happen to know about Peruvian cities, chances are you won’t have answered ‘Trujillo’. The same applies to language. Our creative choices in terms of how we express ourselves are limited to our semantic repertoire and grammatical knowledge. You can see this by asking your students to write all the tense variants of a given verb while, for instance, playing with the pronoun ‘I’. How many will come up with the more unusual ‘ I had been playing ’ or ‘ I will have played ’? Do they know the simple tenses? The perfect tenses? Some oversights come down to common usage. The more practical ‘ I was watching ’ may beat out the more cumbersome ‘ I had been watching ’, but much of the time, pupils simply won’t have all options available to them, due to their limited familiarity with tenses. Pedagogically, a good starting point would be to explicitly teach those ‘building block’ elements: auxiliaries, past participles, present participles, irregular verbs. Another helpful strategy can be to make judicious use of visual aids, such as timelines (alongside actual examples of tenses), which demonstrate aspects of time and duration for completed, habitual or continuous events, as well as the temporal relationship between different verbs. David Voisin is a head of MFL An en ceph alograph measures brain activity A ceph alous creatures, like certain worms, appear to lack heads A ceph alopod, such as an octopus, is an animal walking ‘on its head’ 11 teachwire.net/secondary