Caroline K. Mackenzie is the author of Pocket GCSE Latin Etymological Lexicon and is also one of the judges of our new A Love for Classics student competition.
There are so many good reasons to learn Latin (and to love it!), it is difficult to choose just one. However, many of my pupils tell me that learning Latin has significantly improved their knowledge and use of English vocabulary. This is largely thanks to the ubiquitous derivatives (there are two for starters!). We can use Latin roots to help decipher the meanings of English words derived from them.
Some are obvious, e.g. labor (work or toil) gives us ‘labour’, ‘laborious’, etc. and navis (ship) ‘naval’ or ‘navy’. Others are perhaps not as easy to spot but confer a quiet thrill as the connection with our own word becomes clear, such as celer (fast) and ‘accelerate’.
My personal favourites are what I call ‘double derivatives’, e.g. ‘noctambulation’, a lovely word meaning sleep-walking, from nox (night) and ambulo (walk).
Latin grammar itself is jam-packed with words directly sprung from their Latin ancestors. verbum (word) gives us ‘adverb’ and ‘verb’, while all the cases of nouns have Latin origins. ‘Nominative’ is from nomen (name) and ‘names’ the subject of a sentence or clause. ‘Vocative’ from voco (I call) is used for addressing or ‘calling’ someone. Perhaps trickier to grasp is the meaning of ‘accusative’ from accuso (I accuse). However, when we understand the meaning of this case to be that it ‘aims at’ or ‘holds accountable’ the object of a sentence or clause, it makes sense.
In my Pocket GCSE Latin Etymological Lexicon, I collated a selection of derivatives based on the prescribed vocabulary lists for both the OCR and Eduqas GCSEs. A minority of these words do not have obvious derivatives, so these are included separately in appendices as lists. This is not to demote them in any way as all these words, especially the short ones which tend to be hard to learn, are extremely important and the appendices put them firmly on the page. You and your pupils may already have spotted that there is one word in the appendices which does in fact have a derivative that is, arguably, well-known. I’d like to say this was a ‘deliberate mistake’ and that I hid the Latin word in the appendices as a little teaser but, mea culpa, I missed it. Thank you to the avid reader who pointed it out to me!
Even the words with various derivatives are not always easy to learn, especially where the latter are rare and may not instantly spring to mind, say, ‘cibation’ from cibus. For some of the difficult vocabulary, therefore, we included in the Lexicon some lovely illustrations by the artist, Amanda Short. Amanda conscientiously researched each one to incorporate didactic themes (did you spot the Greek derivative there?!). So, the cibus illustration depicts a Roman meal complete with the famous fish sauce (perhaps the Roman precursor to tomato ketchup). If your pupils would like yet another clue for remembering cibus, how about asking them to say it out loud (remembering the ‘c’ is hard as in ‘cat’)? It sounds like ‘kibbles’, dried biscuits that many of our furry friends tuck into every day!
© Amanda Short Design
You and your pupils no doubt already use etymology in their vocabulary learning. To stretch more able pupils, I have included in the Lexicon some very unusual derivatives. An extension activity might be to look up these words in an English dictionary and then to construct a sentence (in English) including the newly learned words. Alternatively, pupils could use the derivatives with which they are already familiar to create further ones of their own – double derivatives can provide ample possible answers here.
Cross-curricular activities might include thinking of Latin-based words in other modern European languages, e.g. what does amo become in French, Italian and Spanish? ‘Peninsular’ may be a term which pupils have learned in Geography – how does the Latin meaning explain it? For more visual learners, it can be fun to illustrate some of the vocabulary. One of the most popular illustrations in the Lexicon is for tandem; pupils could create their own version of this. It should avoid any possible confusion with tamen, a common error in GCSE.
© Amanda Short Design
Another favourite image is the sleeping dormouse for dormio. You could ask your class to invent a name for the dormouse - preferably Latin or Greek! On the subject of names, how many names derive from Latin or Greek? There is in fact already one such name in this blog!
© Amanda Short Design
Some of the illustrations adopt a more modern theme, e.g. lego where we wanted to represent the two quite different meanings of this word. I love the library (from liber) in this image and I have various ideas as to which book the girl might be reading.
© Amanda Short Design
This article is being published to coincide with Bloomsbury’s exciting new competition, A Love for Classics, which launches on the September equinox (21st September). So, I leave you with one more challenge for your pupils: from which Latin word(s) does ‘equinox’ derive and why? They could then use ‘equinox’ as a starting point to think of other derivatives on this theme.
Illustrations in this article are included in the Lexicon and thanks goes to Amanda Short for letting us share them here too.
