Katrin 's avatar
Katrin 2 years ago
“One of my favorite comic strips is Calvin and Hobbes, and I always assumed that its creator dreamed up the word transmogrify. It was fascinating to learn that it has been part of English since the 1600s. I first encountered stupefy while reading the Harry Potter books, but that is also a well-established word, part of the language since the early fifteenth century. And speechify may sound fairly modern but was actually coined in 1723, almost three hundred years ago.” ~ Sue Scibetta Hegland #BeneathTheSurfaceOfWords I was rereading a little of this today because my students struggle with spelling & I was brainstorming. image

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Katrin 's avatar
Katrin 2 years ago
One more: “Philip Durkin is the author of Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English. He makes the observation that, of the one thousand most common English words, just under half come from Latin or French. When we consider the entire body of English words, Dictionary.com estimates that 60% have Greek or Latin origins; the percentage grows to 90% when we look at technical and scientific language. Since so many words in English have come from Latin or Greek (often through French), it is quite productive to study the orderly derivation of English words from classical Latin and Greek etymons.” ~ Sue Scibetta Hegland Chapter Seven: It Runs In The Family image