Stuck in the Middle?

Sundays are busy.

Garbage goes out. Grocery store. Prep for school. Organize paperwork. Check the calendar. Plan the week.

These days, Sundays also include 1 or 2 kiddos in the morning, followed by Old English for Orthographers. That LEXinar was one of my first two, developed in 2014 because a beautiful and curious soul from Nashville asked me for it. Since a lot of my scholarship community has some kind of background in Orton-Gillingham (or MSLE), many of them have encountered Bob Calfee’s “Layers of Language” triangle model in which English words are divvied up into so-called Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek “layers.” You can totally google it if you want to see it.

That triangle is problematic for a lot of reasons. For starters, of the dozen words it claims are “Anglo-Saxon” (bird, blood, cry, ditch, girl, grave, jump, laugh, mother, mouth, run, wash), at least three are not, and a fourth one might not be. The words girl and jump lack Old English roots, and cry is from Old French, from a Latin verb for ‘wailing or keening’ and probably originally echoic, like squeal and squeak or whine and wheedle.

The word grave is actually two different words — homographs — and honestly, I don’t think either of them is really a “common” or “everyday word used often in ordinary situations” — if it is, I feel sorry for those kids. One of the graves is, in fact, of Old English origin, and thus “Anglo-Saxon”: the one that means ‘burial place.’ It’s related to groove and thus to groovy. The other one, unrelated, means ‘serious’ and it’s Latinate, as we can see when we look at its broader word family: gravity, gravitation, gravitas, aggravate.

Even the 8 words that are actually of Old English origin paint a false picture. Many words of Old English origin are wonderfully abstract, higher-register words, like forlorn or fathom or abide.

Another problem is that the triangle uses non-empirical descriptors, contending that words of Latin origin are “technical, sophisticated words,” and then cherry-picking their examples. They conveniently overlook words with Latinate histories like cup, plate, sock, pen, pencil, note, round, square, class, catch, lesson, and chair.  The triangle does the same thing with Greek, stacking the evidence deck by picking only “specialized words used mostly in science,” like atmosphere and chromosome. They mistake genome for a “compound,” and they choose 100% Modern English words, coined by modern scholars, from Greek parts. I can assure you that the ancient Greeks never once discussed the atmosphere, chromosomes, genomes, photographs, or thermometers.

I’ve been speaking and writing about this very thing for a long time. One of the big things that this triangle misses is French — not the modern loanwords like mustache and chef and chaise and niche  and château in which a <ch> spells /ʃ/, but the much earlier contributions from those Franco-Vikings, the Normans, and their Scandinavian version of Old French. Words like chance and choice and march and catch. The words chair and chief — commonly mistaken as “Anglo-Saxon” words — were actually borrowed from Old French in early Middle English and then re-borrowed from Modern French into Modern English centuries later as chaise and chef.

The river we call English has not stopped flowing, but the triangle has no place for any of those words.

Where a word — or an element — came from and how it got here? That matters. Even to young kids, just acquiring their literacy.

One of my online students, I call him Thane (go look it up), is in 6th grade and has a wonderful dyslexic mind. He understands his dyslexia to require him to take additional time to process and produce language; indeed, I have noticed that speeding through things with him is never helpful, but given enough time to think through his understanding, he makes clear and often brilliant connections. He is finely-tuned to pronunciation, and it’s something we talk about all the time. For example: “Where does the [ʧ] come from in country?”

Today, we were studying the words contract and contrast, and it was really a lesson in WYSIWYGgery, that tendency to fail to look beneath the surface. These two words look a lot alike on the surface, and all phonics would do with them is divide them into syllables. However, word sums for the two words reveal two very different structures: one is a compound <contra + st>, and the other is a base plus a prefix <con + tract>.

We decided to zero in on contrast, and he chose the <st> base to study further. Along the way, we encountered stage and state, two words commonly mistaken for “Anglo-Saxon” words. The truth is so much more interesting. I asked Thane to do a word sum for state, and he offered *<sta + te>. I was taken aback, because we had just been looking at that <st> base. I know that feeling well, the sense of being totally puzzled by my dyslexic student’s error, because we had just been talking about a thing.

But given enough time, and my curiosity, Thane was able to explain his reasoning, which was really brilliant. “Why did you put the plus sign there?” I asked. I did not tell him he was wrong, or tell him to trace it, or pull out a flashcard. I just asked him what he was thinking. And I’m so glad I did.

“Well, I know that ate is a word on its own, so it can’t be a suffix.” Again, I didn’t tell him he was wrong. I just nodded and moved on.

“So what does ate mean?” I asked him.

He told me, “Like, I ate dinner.“

“OK, so it’s the past tense of eat. I said. Every day I eat dinner; yesterday I ate tacos.” He nodded. I pointed again to state. “Does the word state have anything to do with eating?” I asked.

“No.”

“Well then there must be something else going on.” I pulled up the Online Etymology Dictionary. We looked up ate, and it directed us to eat. We went to eat and Thane told me right away that it’s from Old English. Then I typed <-ate> into the search bar, and we found that any <-ate> suffix we have in English is Latinate. They are not the same form!

“Oh, wow!” he said. There it was: understanding and proof. Not drills and memorization, but understanding.

“Let’s look at another one,” I said. We studied <st + age>. Thane knows his way around a theater, so he could tell me what a stage is. I also used the phrase at this stage of my life… to give him another idea of the word’s senses. “Do you think that the <age> has to do with age?” I asked him. He did not. We also studied postage and courage and garage to see a different pronunciation of that suffix.

Just because things may look or sound the same doesn’t mean they are the same. And just because they look or sound different, doesn’t mean they are! The suffix <-less> and the quantifier less are not the same; the suffix <-ful> and the adjective full basically are the same. The suffix <-able> and the word able are not the same; the suffixes <-able> and <-ible> historically are the same thing. They’re allomorphs: variant forms of the same deeper morphemic structure.

The Germanic grave is not the same thing as the Latinate grave. They may look the same, but they’re not.

All those sweet little pieces of English that get missed in the triangle? That Norman French that burst into an already Scandinavianized Old English? Yeah, that’s Middle English. It’s just where Doug Harper and I will be picking up for our Etymology conference next month.

I will be announcing options for virtual attendance this week. Don’t get Stuck in the Middle (English). Stay tuned, and join us.