When I attended elementary school, I was taught the fundamentals of how words were formed––Roots. Within the definition of a root, we would find the word itself, its pronunciation, part of speech, and its English definition. Sometimes those English words contained different meaning, but I digress.
Learning the meaning of roots of words made (for me) learning vocabulary and spelling so much easier. I retain those lessons to this day. They fostered my interest in the history of our fascinating language.
The root of a word contains the basic meaning. A root word is also known as a base word, or its stem. Their origins are usually Latin or Greek. It is in the root part of a word that the base element or basic meaning is contained. Once you know the meaning of that root, you can manipulate it with prefixes or suffixes, and change the meaning of the word. Sounds like another Blog post to me.
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| Roots are the underlying support of trees. Roots are the underlying support of words. |
Roots are supports. For example:
astro = star bi = two cardio = heart hydro = water hypno = sleep micro = small mono = one pod = foot psycho = mind pyro = fire script = write therma =heat tri = three uni = one
I've offered a few root words. Can you supply a prefix or suffix to the them to discover new words and how richly they alter their roots?
Using a tree is a wonderful and accurate analogy of how languages are born, grow, and change. I've read that a mature language, like a tree, will extend itself into surrounding languages, so some of its words (branches) become intertwined words of other languages that have different roots. What do you think?
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