Of Snools, Snickersnees and Defenestration: What a Kerfuffle!

Tags

crestfallen, defenestration, flibbertigibbet, kerfuffle, lob, snickersnee, snool, wanwit

The Defenestration of Prague, 1618 by Václav BROŽÍK.This painting makes the action apparent. Read about this word making its appearance in English in 1620.

After the heaviness and despair of the last few weeks as we have faced the unspeakable horrors instigated by Nazi Germany, at the end of the week we escaped to busy ourselves in the whimsical and the playful. I resurrected Robert Pirosh‘s letter seeking employment as a screen writer to producers and directors in 1934. The playfulness of Pirosh’s language and his relish of words was contagious. The room erupted with laughter as this year’s students shrieked over words, the sound and taste of them in the mouth, a quirky or unexpected denotation, a word’s roots. Too often in school we attempt to trammel and tame words, line them up into lists, force students to memorize them in the hope that like seeds these miserable lists will create accurate spellers and robust vocabularies! We force students to look for the rhyme or the ‘little word within’ or command ‘look, say, cover, write!’ as if that will instil a love of words! Rarely do we ask students to play around with words to simply savour and enjoy.

Students were amazed at where the love of words can take you and amused and in awe of Pirosh’s way with words. His witty application letter can be found here on Letters of Note. 

 

 

While this may appear fun and frivolous, don’t underestimate the learning that went on here as students:

• searched in the OED exploring the etymology entries, becoming familiar with how the dictionary works
• explored different forms the spelling took over the years
• used the OED’s thesaurus to unearth long forgotten words that in many cases they want to revive. (A small campaign is underway to revive  ‘snool’!)
• recognized compound words: crestfallen, snickersnee
• discovered words created for a particular occasion-such as ‘defenestration’ derived from Latin noun fenestra  “window, opening for light,”.This word word amused Takumi who discovered that it was coined on May 21st, 1618 specifically for the incident known as “The Defenestration of Prague” when two Catholic deputies and a secretary were tossed from a window to a moat below by Protestant rebels! This defenestration sparked the thirty years war!
• uncovered roots showing the influence of many languages on English such as the Dutch word ‘snickersnee’.
• encountered entertaining etymologies. Did anyone realize that ‘lob’ once meant something hanging and pendulous coming from the East Frisian etymon ‘lobbe ‘: hanging lump of flesh’?  Listen below to the origins of  ‘snools’, ‘kerfuffle’, ‘humdinger ‘and ‘flibbertigibbet’.

 

 

Finally students lined up with their favorite word in order of entry into English from the oldest to the newest. They understood that words have entered (and faded from ) English in  a variety of times from a variety of places.

 

 

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Revive ‘wanwit’!

I cannot close this post without a plea for the immediate resuscitation of <wanwit> and several other words that once attached themselves to this now non-productive prefix!  This Old English prefix <wan-> expressed negation and privation (lacking a quality) a little like <un->. The OED notes that ‘the number of words formed with the prefix is considerable, but none of them has survived into modern English, and only one (wanspéd, ill-success) into Middle English period’.

Wanton, want and wane:

Of the many new formations that arose in Middle English, only wantoȝen, undisciplined, wanton adj. and n., still survives in use ‘with no consciousness of its etymological meaning’. So wanton’ <wan+ton>’ resistant to control’ found in the 14th century from the almost forgotten prefix <wan->  and <ton>, the  bound base element directly derived from Middle English  towen, itself from Old English togen, the past participle of teon “to train, discipline”, “to pull, draw,’ ( Online Etymology Dictionary). The Middle English sense of ‘unruly’ and ‘undisciplined’ by the end of the 14th century slid into further negativity (pejorated) to ‘sexually promiscuous’. Ayto notes the etymological connection of OE <wane> and 12th century <want> ! ‘Want’ implies a ‘wishing to have’ due to a ‘lack of something’. <wan-> according to Ayto is a reduced form of the adjective <wane> related to the modern English verb <wane>.   ‘wanwit’ may be chiefly Scottish, according to OED but why has this useful word slipped from usage? I know many a wanwit! And while we’re making room for ‘wanwit’ why not ‘wanhope; hopelessness and despair, ‘wanthriven‘ : ill deverloped, stunted in growth , and ‘wanchancy’– unlucky, dangerous and uncanny.

Here are snippets from the many words we like:

‘I like foolish, tricky and nefarious words such as whippersnapper, gormless, dandiprat and wanwit’

 From Masato: I like words. I like perplexing, scientific words, such as: mitochondria, nucleic, melatonin, phosphate. I like high-classed, complex, aristocratic words, such as superior, revolting, ignorant, aesthetics. I like bright, vivid words, such as, shimmer, flourish, sheen, gloze I like speedy words, such as swift, quick, swish zoom’.

From Mauricio: I like words, I like quirky strange words such as basorexia, callipygean, ludicrous, knismesis. I like mystifying, wicked, creepy words such as odious, sordid, razzmatazz, bamboozle. I like short, offensive words such as potty, dopey, dotty, bitty. I like goofy, comical, funny words, such as tadderdiddle, snickersnee, diphthong, puppenhaus.

From Tatiana: I like words. I like sparkly, bright words, such as glistering, dazzling, radiant, luminescent.I like words. I like silly, cheerful, laughable words, such as peppy, cock-a-hoop, blithesome, ebullient. I like calm, soft, peaceful words, such as serenous, lithe, fair, passionate.I like odd, complicated, unrecognisable words, such as squiriferous, nudnik, epalpebrate, snollygoster.I like big, bold, eloquent words, such as inconsequential, pragmatic, spontaneous,tenacious.

From this cavort in words I hope students see that language is creative and changeable. I hope they continue to play with, explore, search the dictionary and remain curious with eye and ear ever towards an unexpected turn of phrase.

“A word is dead when it’s been said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.” Emily Dickinson.

And to look at more lists of words- go here to find the words circled and collected by writer David Foster Wallace.

Roots of Resistance

Tags

PIE, resistance

‘There is no better choice- you might as well agree. If you resist …you will die!’ written by Suraj, illustrated by Shania showing  ‘Justice’ with the mask of impartiality torn away and the balanced scales of justice damaged.

‘Resistance’, or the lack of it, is one of the the themes we see running through our readings this week and for the next few weeks.  We spent time discussing the meaning and then teasing out the connotations of what we understand first before rushing thoughtlessly to resources.

We asked questions such as:

• When is resistance negative?
• Under what circumstances is resistance positive?
• When might it be a moral imperative to resist?
• What conditions cause resistance?
• What are the qualities of resistor?
• What are the antonyms of resistance?

 

Of course our immediate thoughts and musings will alter and adjust to accommodate new learning and discovery but by beginning with what we think we know as group, immediately throws up a host of questions and so begins the investigative process.

Celebrating Errors as Opportunities

One student hypothesis for the morphemic analysis of resist was *<re +siste+ance> while another was *<re+siste + en+ce>. I was glad the analysis with *<siste> had occurred. These analyses show how some students had glommed onto a pattern about reinstating the final non-syllabic <e> without thinking  about the circumstances under which this does and does not occur.

 Too often we see errors as shameful , a reflection of poor teaching or lack of learning. Instead these misanalyses provided an opportunity to briefly consider the roles of the final, non- syllabic <e>.  Will students retain this information? Obviously not- that will be the subject of a later focused inquiry. However, this brief discussion plants the seed, develops an awareness that this single grapheme- all too often daubed as the blooming ‘magic ‘e” is NOT magic but does have several important functions! We briefly discussed how final, non-syllabic <e> can:

1. cause a single vowel to be ‘long’ as seen in <hate>. However, ‘Awas!’ (danger) as we say here in Malaysia. Never assume this is the only role of this humble grapheme <e> when in the final position of a base. Consider ‘have’, ‘love’, ‘shove’, ‘give’. Nary a long vowel phoneme in earshot! Merely the principle that no English word will end with <v> instead write <ve>.
2. prevent a single consonant letter which is preceded by a single vowel from doubling under certain circumstances.
3.  prevent plural confusion as in ‘horse’. Without the <e> we may assume more than one *<hors>. One of the several roles of <e> is to nullify that potential ambiguity.

It was in the end the recognition of other members of the family, those sharing the same base element- such as <resist>, <persist> and <insist> that proved the lack of <e> and allowed us to proceed to :<re+sist+ ance>.

Digging Through the Layers of Time: exposing the distant PIE roots

‘Resistance’ as a noun has been around since the mid 14th c. It’s meaning from Latin resistere is to make a stand, to oppose. In 1939 the term extended to include the concept of an organized, covert position. Through our readings of Nazi Germany and occupied France, we could connect with this. The verb resist is slightly younger than it’s noun relative, first attested in late 14th century. It was here, digging around in the ‘resist’ entry, that we uncovered more about the root: Latin sistere to take a stand, to stand firm. In this entry we were nudged towards assist – obviously sharing the same base element<sist>.

 It was here, ‘assisted’ by assist, that we glimpsed the depth, breadth and enormity of this ancient Proto Indo European root, the name for the family of languages that amongst hundreds, includes English. The tree here shows the sub- families including the three key groups that effect English: Germanic, Greek and Italic. This name has been applied to what is supposed to be the original language. The Proto Indo European language, many argue, was  spoken at least 5, 500 years ago.

Back in the Depths of Time: the murky PIE roots

Latin ‘sistere’ is spawned in the PIE root *si-st- a ‘reduplicated form’ of the PIE root  *sta’.  This then intensifies the meaning so not simply ‘stand’ but ‘ to stand firmly’. This much was discovered by one student who comes in to the class before school to learn handwriting  (the beautiful and highly practical ‘Chancery’ of Real Script) and through these ‘handwriting’ sessions, has been working on uncovering the backstory, to reveal the ancestors of the words: resist, stand, consist, exist, statue, and stay. His work below, he realizes, is just the tip of the iceberg. He is determined to find a clear way to represent this and share his discoveries with the class. Stay (should that be <st+ay>?) with us for the next installment, where  the status of this base and the intricacies and spread of the root will be revealed! No rest for our budding etymologist, no matter the cost, he remains constant to the task. The status of this root is simply arresting!!

A glimpse into his thinking so far:

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Just a Jump to the Left

Sir William Jones (1746–1794), Fellow (1776), Chief Justice of Calcutta (copy after Joshua Reynolds), John Linnell (1792–1882), University College, University of Oxford

A brief sidestep from the intended path of resist,  a mere jump on a track to the left, lured by the irresistibly erudite William Jones. William Jones, an 18th century philologist, polymath: poet, lawyer, anthropologist, lawyer, judge, and botanist is renowned for recognizing and discussing the connection between Sanskrit, Latin and Ancient Greek. What a prodigious mind! Thirteen languages tripped lightly from his tongue and the modest claim that he knew another twenty-eight  ‘reasonably well’ by the time he died!

‘Poet, philologist, polymath, polyglot, and acknowledged legislator was the foremost Orientalist of his generation and one of the greatest intellectual navigators of all time.’

His father, a mathematician creator of the mathematical term ‘pi’, died when Jones was three. Despite this setback, his mother’s novel educational approach was to provide our young lad with access to a wide range of books accompanied by the injunction: ‘Read, and you will know!’ Oh, if it were only that simple! Nevertheless, by seven the young Jones must have obeyed his mother’s glorious command as he won a scholarship to Harrow School where his linguistic prowess soon became apparent:, ‘translating and imitating the Greek and Roman classics, teaching himself Hebrew, learning Arabic script, taking the lead in a tragedy he wrote entitled ‘Meleager’, and, having acquired more Greek than the headmaster, Robert Carey Sumner, gaining the nickname ‘the Great Scholar’.

By the age of 26 Jones was hanging out with Dr Johnson ( of dictionary fame) and the other ‘luminaries of the Enlightenment: Fox, Pitt, Boswell, Georgina Duchess of Devonshire, Garrick, Sheridan,Reynolds.’  Jones studied law, which led to India. Knighted at 37 , he was appointed as High Court judge in Calcutta.  He did more than any other writer ‘to destroy Eurocentric prejudice, reshaping Western perceptions of India and the Orient.’ (Franklin, M). The climate, stress and inflammation of the liver sadly took its toll on Jones and he died in Calcutta at 47 but leaving in his wake a translation of Hindu and Muslim laws which apparently paved the way for self government.

‘The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source..’ (Jones,delivered a lecture in Calcutta entitled “The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus ,Feb.2,1786)

If you are intrigued by the scholarly efforts to reconstruct this language, then now for the ‘pièce de résistance’, listen to linguist Andrew Byrd below recite “The Sheep and the Horses” the PIE fable written in 1868 by German linguist and PIE enthusiast August Schleicher.

‘A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.’

For more things Proto Indo European, go here to Archaeology, Telling Tales in Proto Indo European where should you now be enthralled by the sound of this reconstructed language, you can listen to another PIE tale ‘The King and the God!’

Illustration at the post’s beginnings is by Suraj and Shania for the second of our Tiny Tales series. Watch this space!

 re ‘piece de resistance’

 And simply because ‘I never met a word I didn’t like’, to steal unashamedly from Will Rogers, and simply because ‘piece de resistance’ is just that, look at what I discovered about this phrase. Attested in English from 1831, the phrase obviously arrived whole and untampered from French and remains so until this day. Pièce de résistance originally had the sense of “the most substantial dish in a meal.!”

Steps Towards Genocide

Tags

apathy, assault, genocide, harassment, Holocaust, ridicule, scapegoating, terrorism

 

Detail from the illustrated version Of William Blake’s poem, The Poison Tree from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794

In some lessons the focus is not word inquiry yet word inquiry is a critical element of the lesson. This sounds contradictory but illustrates how principles of morphology and etymology are embedded in every humanities lesson. Today our focus was an examination of the elements of hatred. We began with various words and phrases written on the board: ‘scapegoating’ , ‘ridicule’, ‘harassment’, ‘assault’, ‘social avoidance’, ‘terrorism’, ‘not challenging belittling jokes’. I had asked students to rank the categories: ‘prejudiced attitudes’, ‘discrimination’, ‘genocide’,’violence’, ‘acts of prejudice’, from the lower levels of hatred to the most extreme and to do this on a pyramid as suggested in the Pyramid of Hate a useful framework by the Shoah foundation for considering the degrees of negative actions and attitudes as steps on the path to genocide.

Students discussed the categories and where they would place the attitudes and actions in small groups. In order to do this, students needed to understand these words and that means beyond ‘a look it up in the dictionary, read only the denotation, learn it and move on!’ We had examined these words throughout the year, the morphology and etymology, and continue to refine our understandings in ‘working definitions’. So despite the length of this post (!) the word analysis was ten minutes, a great opportunity review of past investigations into the morphemes and roots.

Scapegoating: We immediately saw this as a compound word made up of three morphemes, <scape+goat+ing>. The first element <scape> according to Ayto is a clip of escape, a fascinating word and a story for another occasion- read here if you cannot wait! Rather than go through a longer process of investigation, I told students the story behind the word gleaned from Etymology online and Ayto’s Word Origins: first attested in English from 1530 in Tyndale’s bible where he translated the Latin phrase caper emissarius . This referred to a Hebrew word azazel perhaps being the name of a demon , the receiver of the goat or as later translators believed, it meant the  ‘goat that departs’. This was linked with Yom Kippur,  The Day of Atonement. So in Tyndale’s translation of the bible, the goat symbolically carried the sins of the people. All this is far more eloquently written about in Online Etymology Dictionary. However, it is only in 1824 that it takes on the meaning of ‘one who is blamed or punished for the mistakes or sins of others’ and a further one hundred and nineteen years later before we reach 1943 where ‘scapegoat’ is used verbally, according to O.E.D. in the Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology. We wondered whether this was in reference to the targeting of Jews in Nazi Germany. Equally interesting are the words ‘scapegrace” and ‘scape-gallows’ both  words sharing the base element ‘scape’ in reference to those who deserve hanging!

Ridicule: Students recollected this from a previous investigation <ride+ic+ule> from Latin ridere/risus: laugh. The first element, the base, is bound, a homograph of the free base element <ride> itself Old English in origin. As we see from ridere and risus, if we remove the suffixes, Latin <-ere> and <-us> we are left with the stems <rid> and <ris> which transfer into English morphology as the twin base elements<ride> and <rise>. The bound base <rise> like its twin too is a homograph. Both have lead to words such as: ridiculous, deride derision, derisive, risible.

Harassment: We are familiar also with ‘harassment’ <harass+ment> from Old French harer ‘to set the dogs on’, combined perhaps with Old French harier to drag, to draw out. The first verbal use of this as ‘harass’ is attested in 1610 with the noun harassment in 1753.  The figurative image of setting dogs onto someone resonates with us as you will see in the clip below when one group discussed this.

Aasault: this word also had been investigated earlier in the year and students rapidly divided the morphemes <as+sault> several remembering, to my delight, the Latin etymons salire to leap and saltus a leap. From these roots a plethora of words assault and therefore assailant, assail, somersault, resilient, saute, saltation. (See my previous post, October’s: Will You Join the Saltation? )

Terrorism: we had not previously examined this word, but a quick analysis revealed first< terror+ism> as a hypothesis , then a refinement to this with <ter+or+ism> the vowel suffix doubling due to the vowel suffix <-or> or a third hypothesis < terr+or+ism> We saw it was from the Latin infinitive terrere to fill with fear as opposed to another unrelated Latin etymon terra meaning dry earth or land.

It’s only as I write this post now, that I discover that ‘terrorism’ in fact was first used in 1795 with the sense of “government intimidation during the Reign of Terror in France” (March 1793-July 1794). It broadened in 1798 at the time of the Irish rebellion to refer to the systematic use of terror as a policy. In this entry from the Online Etymology Dictionary, I discovered  the use of ‘dynamitism’  for terrorism and during World War 1 the term ‘frightfulness’ a translation of German ‘schrecklichkeit’ for the intentional policy of terrorising enemy civilians.

Using the Ngram viewer to note the increase in the use of the word ‘terrorism’ from 1780 unto 2008.

 

Genocide: This was the last word students examined in this ten minute review. They recognized <gene+o+cide> as the morphemes and determined from the evidence of the word ‘decide’ <de+cide>, that <cide> was a bound base and frequent in use. Genocide therefore is a compound word. I introduced students to the term hybrid ( I hope correctly) as the word combines both Latin and Greek roots:Greek ‘genos’- race or kind and Latin ‘caedere “to strike down, chop, beat, hew, fell, slay”.

‘Genocide’ is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’.(Lemkin)

The creation of this word is attributed to Polish-born U.S. jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1944 and replaced older words such populicide (1799) and the 1893 word ‘folk-murdering’, the English translation of ‘Völkermeuchelnden’. In his work to prepare for the Nuremberg trials Lempkin, managed to embed the term ‘genocide’ in the indictment against Nazi leadership. However, it was not until December 1949, that United Nations approved the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide’. He worked to encourage nations to pass legislation supporting this convention until he died in 1959, ‘ impoverished and exhausted from these efforts’. Read more about Lempkin here: Coining a Word and Championing a Cause.

One of my students introduced me to the work of Yehuda Bauer, a leading Holocaust historian. This student had found a statement by Bauer that particularly resonated with him in his attempt to understand the conditions that caused the Holocaust. (See him read this below).

Bauer’s writing helped me to clarify the differences between the connected terms ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’. He writes of the vagueness of Lempkin’s definition of genocide as it includes ‘ both partial and total destruction’. Instead, Bauer suggests ‘ retaining the term genocide for “partial” murder and the term Holocaust for total destruction’. He argues that: ‘Holocaust’  can ‘be used in two ways: to describe what happened to the Jews at Nazi hands and to describe what might happen to others if the Holocaust of the Jewish people becomes a precedent for similar actions’.

Bauer writes of the obvious overlap between the two terms: ‘they belong to the same species of human action, and the differences between them remain to be seen, beyond the obvious one of partial versus total destruction. Genocide, then, is the planned attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, or racial group using measures like those outlined by Lemkin and the U.N. convention, measures that accompany the selective mass murder of members of the targeted group. Holocaust is a radicalization of genocide: a planned attempt to physically annihilate every single member of a targeted ethnic, national, or racial group.’

Yet as Bauer explains, ‘reality is more complicated by far than our attempts to describe it… Extreme forms of human suffering are not comparable, and one should never say that one form of mass murder is “less terrible,” or even “better,” than another. The difference between the Holocaust and less radical genocides lies not in the amount of sadism or the depth of hellish suffering, but elsewhere.’

Read Chapter One of Yehuda Bauer’s (2001), Rethinking the Holocaust 

Read the New York Times review of this book :Sounds of Silence

Holocaust: Students were surprised to discover that the word holocaust is first attested in English as early as the 13th century so connected is it in their minds to the events of 1941-1945.  It is in fact a Greek compound from the etymons ‘holos’ whole and ‘kaustos’ the Greek adjective of ‘kaiein’ to burn. Applying it specifically mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime during the period 1941–5 was first recorded in 1957.

Apathy:

We also revisited words such as empathy <em+path+y> in order to discuss <a+path+y> both from the Greek root pathos: “suffering, feeling, emotion, calamity”. We discussed the prefix<a-> has a sense of not. Again it was only as I wrote this post that I looked closer at  the etymology entry to discover it’s original sense when first attested in 1600 was positive in connotation! It was not until a hundred and thirty three years later,1733, that the more familiar negative sense is attested: sense of “indolence of mind, indifference to what should excite.”

Bauer argues that ‘in the light of the Shoah it is time to adopt three more commandments,

“Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never but never be a bystander”.

Blake’s illustration at the beginning of this post and the poem the Poison Tree has for me always exemplified how hatred can fester in the soul and left unchecked taints and murders. In the past weeks we have seen how hatred unchecked, ‘watered’ with fears and ‘sunned’ by distorted lies and propaganda rapidly escalated to the appalling violence in Kristallnacht and ultimately paved the way for the Holocaust.

Journals and Diaries : Voices from the past

Tags

diary, journal

Portrait of a Girl with a Ball’, one of 300 watercolours by Gele Sekstajn who died in 1943 – “I think I am the last surviving Jewish painter,” she wrote. From Oneg Shabbat, or Joy of Sabbath

Today, if I kept a diary, I would have written: American author Jack Gantos came to our school today. He talked about writing and the power of words to convey images and feelings that allow us to enter the lives of others, to connect to others and to see our world differently. He told us to look and listen. He told us that we have so many stories within us- it’s just a matter of drawing them out, of shaping them and revising.

Read stories aloud, weigh each word, cut the ‘waffle’, Gantos advised. We should open our eyes to the possibilities around us, map out our house, our neighbourhood and annotate these with statements of where various incidents in our life  occurred: the hedge we leapt over while attempting the short cut home for dinner, the spot where we fell down the stairs in the race to answer the phone and broke our foot, the tree house our father helped us build and where the baby ducks were killed by a vicious kookaburra -all should be marked. Overheard conversations become fodder for our journals, the raw material to draw on later. Gantos inspired us to snoop, to listen, to absorb, to look,to remember, to record in sketches and words and to do this daily for 10-15 minutes. This is then the raw stuff of stories. Jack Gantos invited his audience of delighted seventh graders into his world, his seventh grade life so that we all felt as if we were there with him. He inspired and rekindled dormant memories of our past through his past, small fragments from our life journey.

Jack Gantos with his journal in front of map marked with significant incidents of his childhood.

Gantos showed us the journals he kept: battered, pages densely written, held together with rubber-bands, an explosion of coloured sticky notes indicating character, setting and images. Gantos has over two hundred of these journals, each page densely written and it’s to these he turns to write stories.  I began to wonder about the words ‘journal’ and diary and the stories these words would tell.  As we left, I asked a student about the word journal – here’s what we found out:

 

 

 

 

These recorded conversations  above reflect the morphological and etymological understandings of these students. Both girls are comfortable with the process of inquiry: hypothesising, confirming their initial hypothesis with evidence, using resources to confirm or inform, making further refinements to their hypothesis. They question and are happy to hold something as a hypothesis until they have further evidence. These video clips indicate their knowledge of morphemes- their recognition that <-al> may be a suffix but may also be part of the base. It depends on evidence.

The clips also show these students are comfortable using resources to locate information about the root, and how they work through this carefully. They don’t just glom onto the first word in the etymology entry to state this is the root, ‘case closed’. Rather, they realize that their reading of the etymological entry is a “journey” through time, all part of a word’s story. It is always interesting to meet  the other members of the family- the words that share the same base element or the words that share a different base element but come from the same root. Using this information and indicating it in the elegant concision of a matrix can generate more questions about suffixes and bases which reinforces and extends our knowledge of the morphological structure of words.

Journal- The Story: it’s all in a day’s work.

 ‘Journal’ is attested first in English in the mid 14th century from Anglo-French evolving from an Old French word ‘jornal’ which came from a Latin etymon ‘diurnalis’ meaning daily.  When it was first used in English it referred to daily accounts and inventories. It only became associated with the idea of a personal journal from 1600 in French. It was another one hundred and twenty eight years later that it took on an additional sense of daily publication. As you heard in the video clips Nikki immediately wondered about ‘journey’. She had seen the similarity in letters but rather than assume a relationship, she began to question the possibility of a shared base and the existence of the suffix <-ey>.

Hypothesis:

We have since found other words connected to our potential base <journ>. Amongst these words : the lovely sojourn,and adjourn.  Sojourn meaning stay or dwell for a time, directly from Old French in the mid 13th century and from Latin <sub+diurnare> , led us to consider ‘so-‘ as a variant form of  Old French <sous>  and <sou> itself a variant form of the prefix <sub->. To adjourn is from a French phrase ‘a jorn’:literally to a stated day.  And yes we included <-ey> as a suffix. We need further evidence to support this hypothesis but want to let this ‘sit’ for a bit and revisit later to consider whether ‘journey’ should be analyzed as the bound base <journ+ ey> or regarded as <journey>. We have seen in OED that French  <-ée> is Anglicized as <-ey> so journey from journée:’ a day, day’s space, day’s travel, work, employment’. We saw that even up until when Johnson was compiling his dictionary in 1755, it had the primary sense of ‘the travel of a day.’

Diary- The Story: from daily allowance to daily notations

The sense of ‘diary’ as a book where daily events are recorded was first attested in Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607):iv. i. 133   ‘This is my Diary, Wherein I note my actions of the day.’  Prior to this, a diary referred to ‘daily allowance’ in the 1580’s from Latin diarium, dies. Ayto refers to ‘diary’ and ‘journal’ as ‘semantic cousins’, different bases, same root.

Below is the matrix Nikki created to show her understanding of the word ‘diary’ a bound base from Latin dies day. We hesitated over the analyisis of Latin suffix <-urn>. Should it be <-urnal> or <urn+al>? We recorded it as two morphemes as we could find evidence of <-al> as an adjectival suffix in many words: global, final.

The word journal is the older of both words in English but the sense of a place to record personal events in both journal and diary, seemed to occur at the same time in the 1600s. However, ‘journal’ is the broader of the two terms covering written publications collected together while diary is narrower referring to the specific daily recordings of a person.

Diaries of the Past

‘Diaries are among our most precious items of heritage. People in all walks of life have confided and often still confide their thoughts and experiences to the written page, and the result is a unique record of what happens to an individual over months, or even years, as seen through their eyes. No other kind of document offers such a wealth of information about daily life and the ups and downs of human existence.’ Great Diary Project

We, in our focus on the Holocaust and Human Behaviour, have read diary entries of people living at this time:

Helen Baker’s diary where she records what she saw following the German annexation of Austria, March 14 and 15, 1938

Watch below the footage shot by the Bakers, Americans in Vienna during these turbulent times, listen to excerpts from Helen’s diary.

 

 

An anonymous girl diarist, March 6, 1942 wrote in her diary, salvaged from the Lodz ghetto:

March 6, 1942:

‘Beautiful, sunny day today. When the sun shines, my mood is lighter. How sad life is. When we look at the fence separating us from the rest of the world, our souls, like birds in a cage, yearn to be free. Longing breaks my heart, visions of the past come to me. Will I ever live in better times?’

Wednesday, March 11,1942:

‘ This ration is much worse than the previous one. Terrible hunger is awaiting us again. I got the vegetable ration right away. There is only vinegar and ice in the beets. There is no food, we are going to starve to death. All my teeth ache and I am very hungry. My left leg is frostbitten. I ate almost all the honey. What have I done? I’m so selfish. What are they going to put on their bread now, what will they say? Mom, I’m unworthy of you. You work so hard. Besides working in the workshop, mom looks awful, like a shadow. She works very hard. When I wake up at twelve or one o’clock at night, I see her exhaustedly struggling to keep working at the sewing machine. And she gets up at six in the morning. I must have a heart of stone. I’m ruthless. I eat everything I can lay my hands on’.

The Holocaust Museum states children’s diaries from this period ‘often addressed themes such as the nature of human suffering, the moral and ethical dimensions of persecution, and the struggle of hope against despair.’

Go here to read about the remarkable  Oneg Shabat archive an underground archive established and run by historian Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum who with his secret group, documented life under Nazi occupation in Warsaw. Ringelblum collected artefacts from letters, diaries, drawings to government documents. He collected information during the day, and wrote notes at night aware that what was happening to the Jews was unprecedented. The Oneg Shabbat materials were preserved in three milk cans. One uncovered in 1946 and another in 1950; the other has yet to be located.

“What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground,” wrote Dawid Graber, age 19. “I would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world. So the world may know all. So the ones who did not live through it may be glad, and we may feel like veterans with medals on our chests. … May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened… in the 20th Century… May history be our witness..”

—From the last will and testament of Dawid Graber, who helped bury the first cache of archives on August 3, 1942

Diaries and journals, the recording of days, that over time grow from a personal record to testimony that bears witness and helps us to face our past.

Read BBC Warsaw Ghetto: The story of it’s secret archive.