Roots (2)

I didn't know it at the time, but there was one subject we did at primary school that was one of the greatest shaping forces in my life.

It was called "Derivation". Now I think about it, I doubt if any child in the class who learned Derivation was very clear on the precise meaning of the term, though it is obvious enough to any adult with some language skills.

This subject was taught in every state government classroom in the upper grades of primary school. I'm sure no kid was especially enthusiastic about it, because it involved a bit of rote learning done on a regular basis as homework, and I've yet to see the child who is keen on homework.

We had a slim textbook for each grade, called Grade [whichever] Derivation. That little book went home with us and back to school daily.

It contained Prefixes, Suffixes, and Roots – Latin and Greek.

Prefixes and suffixes don't need any explanation, I'm sure. A prefix goes before a word to change its meaning, and a suffix comes after. "Pre" means before, so if your phone is prepaid, you pay the charges before you get the service. Add a suffix like "-ock" (meaning "small") to the end of a word like "hill", and we get a hillock – a little hill.

These are often things we come to know just by using them, although we had to learn many others as well by rote and commit them to memory. That was very useful. Here I want to focus on roots.

We were required to learn five new Latin or Greek roots for homework each Monday and Tuesday, were tested on them the next day, and we revised them on Thursday nights for a Friday test. Thus we learned ten new roots a week and by the time we'd finished Grade 8, the last grade at primary school, we had a good stock of them in our heads.

But what use were they?

Studying roots is like the poor man's version of studying Latin and Greek. We didn't know it at the time, but they were vital tools of understanding language and meaning, and therefore of the world around us. They allowed us to meet up with an entirely new word and have a fair chance of deriving its meaning.

If you never learned any at school, then the best way to understand what value they had was to give you some examples. Take "submarine" for example. We learnt that the prefix sub meant under, and the Latin root mare (maris) = sea.

In the unlikely event that we had never met up with a submarine in a picture book, we would have known from derivation that it meant under the sea. Submarine life was underwater sea life. A mariner was a seaman. (If you pick me up on gendered language here I'll have to kill you.)

You don't have to learn five years of Latin and Greek roots to be aware of that derivation, but knowing roots gave us the chance at precision in language that is easy to miss otherwise. Take the word civilisation. We learned that civis meant a city, so it had a different meaning to culture. This affects the perception of the meaning of civilised, when we say that someone was civil to us. Not rude, or rustic, but urbane, related to but different from urban. Sophisticated. We learnt that sophis was the root for knowledge, so we extracted from it the idea of a person who was sophisticated. Philosophy. Philos means loving, so philosopher means a lover of knowledge. No more and no less.

We could work this stuff out without needing Wikipedia or a dictionary!

This gave us vital tools of learning for every subject at high school, and for later in life. In physics, we learned about reflection and refraction. No-one needed to tell us the difference. The prefix re meant back or again, flecto [flexus] meant I bend. Frango [fractus]: I break. So reflection meant turning something back [in this case, light] as a mirror does, and refraction meant breaking light up into its colour spectrum.

In geometry, we got hit with the terms diameter and circumference. Our Derivation told us that dia means through, and meter = a measure. Diameter meant to measure something like a circle straight across or through it. Circum means around, so for a circle, circumference meant going round its edge, not through the centre. Circumnavigate: if we put together circum = around and navis = I steer, no-one needed to tell us hick kids from a tiny country school what that big word meant.

It meant that we could have a go at any unknown word or term. Terra incognita. Terra = the earth, in = not, and cog.... = aware – so that term meant an unknown land. Terra nullius. Null = nothing, we learned, so that was a place where no-one lived [or was supposed to be living!] How useful is that for studying Law? A host of other Latin and Greek roots provide clues to legal terminology.

As I said, we could have a good stab at any old word. Defenestration. De = down, or away. I mightn't have known the other bit, but from studying French, I did know that fenêtre meant window. The suffix ation means the act of – so, defenestration: the act of [throwing something or someone] down from a window.

There you go. Getting rural now [ruris = the country]; take the tractor. Traho [tractus] = I draw or pull, we learned, on pain of staying in at school and writing it out twenty times. Then we get 'intractable'. In = not; tractus = pull + able. Something or someone you can't get to change.

I met up with the word amanuensis for the first time at Queensland University when I was tutoring, when the Head of Department said, "We're going to need an amanuensis for that student in the exams." "A what?" I thought, but remembered the student was disabled. Manus came back to me from Grade 5 Latin roots. Manus = the hand. The student was going to need someone to write for them. They'd need to dictate their exam paper to the amanuensis. Dicto = I say or write. Dictate. Got it?

"I'll arrange it," I said to the Head of Dept, not batting an eyelid. Thank God for the roots!

Dictate. Dictator. Someone who decides [the laws]. Tyrant. From tyro = I rule. Subtle difference there. A tyrant is not necessarily a dictator. Handy for politics study. Tyrannosaurus Rex. Rex = king. Our Jurassic T-Rex is the king over all the reptilian rulers. Jurassic? Jura = a forest. Such linguistic tools are invaluable for natural history too.

There's no end to the usefulness of roots. None at all. Even for spelling. If you know mille = one thousand and annis = a year, then you'll get the right number of Ls and Ns in millennium. You won't spell Happy Anniversary wrongly on the card.

Just last night I was reading this article by [believe it or not] Dennis Wright, on brand-new brain tumour research:

Monitoring the progress and approval process for a completely new chemical entity (NCE) invented by applied molecular biologist, Dennis Wright. A new class of alpha amino acids is reproducing and extending prior antineoplastic indications.

See that word antineoplastic?

What exactly does it mean? It looks daunting till you put in some hyphens. anti-neo-plastic. All I had to do to know its meaning was to go back to my primary school derivation. Anti = against. Neo = new. Plast.... = I flow. Against new flow.

In context, it obviously meant something to counter the development of new growth in brain tumours, given their plasticity.

If kids were taught the 3 Rs, and a healthy dose of Derivation from as early a grade as possible, they would get to appreciate the subtleties of language and the value of knowing precision in meaning. This can be made interesting and lively by a good teacher. It doesn't have to be tedious and dull.

My poor Mum, standing there in her yard galoshes in the dairy, with the muck up over her ankles, hearing me my Latin and Greek roots before I went off to school, gave me a programmed power over language and comprehension of meaning that I could never have imagined, and each kid in that tiny school and every other all over the country had access to that same power.

That's part of the reason why older people can write decent English. They also learned Analysis and Parsing, and Grammar, as we did. I know the difference it makes, because I've assessed thousands of university essays from people between the ages of 18 and 85. The old geezers get the form right every time, and often (because they have had many decades of experience) the substance as well.

I'm not smart, you see. I just know my roots.

P.S. The Latin endings up there may not be dead right as to structure. You see, at high school I had to make a choice between Latin and History, and I chose History. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here right now. If I had chosen Latin, I haven't the foggiest where I'd be – a retired school headmaster, I suspect. Probably not a Latin master, because universities, like every other corporate entity whose business it is to make money, are turfing out their Classics scholars by the score. 

We don't need people who can write literature, you see – we need frackers.

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