there are rules. This is due to
the sheer amount of words that
come from foreign languages,
which each have their own
separate rules for spelling! If
you want to improve your
spelling skills, it helps to know
a few word roots. For instance,
you might have trouble
remembering that first p in
pneumonia. “Why does the p
exist if we don’t even
pronounce it?” wondered all of
us. The answer to that question
OJCLers practicing spirit chants!
lies in its etymology: pneumonia
comes from the Greek noun
pneumōn, meaning lung. This makes sense, given that pneumonia is an
inflammation of the lungs. Once you know pneumonia’s Greek root, it’s much
easier to remember its initial p!
...helps with vocabulary-- both English and Latin/Greek! This is connected
to the previous points. If you study word roots without knowing the definition of
the root, then etymology will seem like much more memorization than it actually
is. Knowing classical vocabulary provides context for the derivative you’re
studying. For example, you might be studying the word pugnacious, which comes
from the Latin verb pugnō. If you stop there, you’ll just be connecting a random
Latin verb with a random English adjective. It’s much more rewarding to know
that pugnō means to fight. This is also true for English vocabulary. If you just
blindly memorize that gregarious, egregious, and aggregate all come from the
Latin noun grex (meaning flock), you might confuse their definitions! However, if
you also learn that gregarious means sociable, egregious means shockingly bad,
and aggregate means combining several elements into a whole, then you’ll get
much more out of your studies .
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