A fun game

[soulchanger]

I'm taking a course in philology called "Greek and Latin Roots of English." One of the exercises in the textbook that recurs in every chapter is that we are given some greek or latin roots and asked to come up with English derivatives. Sometimes this is almost unbearably easy - given the stem "fals-" which means "deceive" and producing "false"

Comments

[halflingmerry]

That was one of my favorite things about Latin. My retention of vocabulary, being able to conjure it alone, is dreadful; but if ever I forget what an English word means, or can't think of the one I want, I can work it out by remembering the roots.

I enjoy it with English words, too. On freerice.com I came across "prehension = seizing". Given that ap- is a variation of ad-, I make "apprehension" to be "toward seizing"?

Shame it's not a two-person game. ;-)

[soulchanger]

Right, like "prehensile" means "suitable for seizing" - as in, a prehensile tail. And interestingly, in spanish "aprender" still means "to learn" in its main sense, even though in modern English we rarely still speak of "apprehending" something as grasping or understanding it. We do use the comparable "comprehend," of course, and if you read a lot of Enlightenment philosophy like I do you'll come across "apprehend" in its older sense.

This ties into the book I'm reading now about consciousness. It proposes that conscious thought processes developed much later than language itself, and so many of our words to describe things like thinking, understanding, etc. are metaphors taken from non-conscious activities. Thus, to learn something is to grasp it or seize it.

[runstaverun]

I love that sort of stuff! Another good ven word is ventriloquism.

Also fun is thinking up horrible puns based on the concept that these are widely known. Especially self-amusing are puns based upon false roots. I've found that they're some of the largest stretches for puns and the least likely to be actually funny, but pretending that Venereal Disease has venir as a root is amusing, even if it is actually rooted with Venus.