Sympathy and Empathy Etymology

Sympathy is a Things Fall Apart vocab word, and empathy appeared in The Namesake on last semester's flocabulary list. I know that you are wondering the root words since the words are so similar. Here goes:

path = feeling

sym = together

en = in (switched to em because spelling developed after people had been pronouncing the words)

sympathy = together feeling or "an expression of pity for another"
empathy = in feeling or "feeling another's pain as one's own"

Etymology Questions from Yesterday

Some students had questions on etymology yesterday. Here are the answers I found.

Bison does not mean "two horns." Bison is a French word meaning "wild ox" and refers to its musky smell.

Quotidian is not related to quad (meaning four). Every qu word does not relate to quad.

Quotidian which means "daily," comes from the Latin quotus "how many" + dies "day"

Knowing Etymology Builds Vocabulary

When you were in elementary school, you learned to read by learning the phonics of the English language and how to decode words. Now you need to keep working on your reading skills by learning to decode more complex words by learning classical roots and affixes (prefixes and suffixes). Often when people are trying to spell a difficult word they claim, "English is such a weird and crazy language." English is not crazy. It's just that English has influences from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, French, and other ethno-cultural words. Historically, England has been conquered by a variety of cultures, so the story of the language is just as diverse.

We started our study of classical roots yesterday with numerology because many of you know the number prefixes of uni, bi, tri, quad, pent, etc. Now throughout the semester we'll keep building our A to Z Taxonomy of classical roots and affixes to improve your decoding skills while reading.

If you ever want to look up the etymology (the word's history) of a word, a great resource is this etymology online dictionary.

Besides the number roots, yesterday we learned male (badly), mal (bad), bene (good) and volle (will) so that you could decode malevolent, malicious, and benevolent.

Morphology

Today in class we are going to transform our vocabulary words by changing the word into its other parts of speech so that we discover how all of our words become verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. William Shakespeare loved to transform words, and if you understand word affixes (prefixes and suffixes), you can uncover Shakespeare's meanings.

Four Square Vocabulary

Remember to create your four-square for your assigned word for Thursday's vocabulary party, featuring Hip Hop flocab songs and a mixer to get to know words.

If you have some holes on your Namesake vocabulary list because you couldn't think how to paraphrase the definition or simplify it, you will be able to seek out the class expert on that word during the party to jazz up your vocab sheet.

Here's the four-square format:

SAT Vocab List From Flocabulary

The 500 SAT vocabulary words that comprise the guiding list for English 10 were taken from the Flocabulary series. The English 10 teachers have cross referenced those words with the books that you are reading this year to devise vocabulary lists. Occasionally, we will listen to the Hip Hop songs that contain the vocabulary words as another strategy for getting the words embedded into your brain. And through that you will learn the words that do not appear in our books.

If you would like to own your own copy of the CD of Flocabulary songs to reinforce your studying, you can order it from a number of bookstores or at http://www.flocabulary.com/.

The CD comes with a book of lyrics and sample tests to make vocabulary learning fun!!

The Namesake Vocab

Below is the list of words for the vocabulary test of The Namesake words on Thursday, Oct. 1. We will work on learning the words through vocabulary strategies in class for part of each Tuesday and Thursday class; however, you will need to extend your studying and strategy work outside of the school day to do well on the test.

acute (22)
morose (33)
despondent (50)
precarious (82)
diminutive (88)
benign (89)
empathy (109)
goad (111)
affluent (141)
anomaly (146)
sate (165)
abhor (176)
abate (181)
innate (200)
tranquil (205)
disparage (214)
subsist (218)
infuse (234)
quotidian (236)
discreet (250)
premonition (255)
aloof (257)
pliable (258)
pedagogue (260)
envious (270)
malaise (273)
uniform (adjective) (274)
renovate (275)
retract (275)
ruse (283)
colossus (285)
diminish (290)
forsake (290)