|
It is the beginning of December, and for those who celebrate, the start of your advent calendar. Like many Christmas traditions, these little calendars began in Germany, with their tiny doors marking the countdown of days until Christmas. Behind each door, you may find a little gift of chocolate or a Bible verse.
But what about the word advent itself? What gifts does it have in store? How is it related to Christmas or calendars? Is it related to the word vent? Or adventure? Let's peek behind the door and find out.
In this investigation, be prepared to learn why we like using student-friendly definitions and why it's important to use different contexts when teaching vocabulary. We also dive deeper into structural elements like prefixes, especially assimilated prefixes. We also learn more about Latin infinitives and the four principal parts of Latin verbs. We learn that looks can be deceiving when homographic bases appear. Finally, we run into a familiar phonological process, palatalization.
|
Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
When we ask students to look up words in the dictionary and copy definitions, they often encounter "dictionary-ese," formally worded phrases written in the style of "category that..." followed by a list of distinguishing features.
Dog: a carnivorous mammal (Canis familiaris) closely related to the gray wolf that has long been domesticated as a pet, occurs in a variety of sizes, colors, and coat types, and is sometimes trained to perform special tasks (such as herding, guarding, or acting as a service animal).
Category: "carnivorous mammal."
Features are listed afterward that distinguish a dog from other "carnivorous mammals" such as bears and sea lions.
Contrast that definition with the more student-friendly definition we might find in the Collins or Longman dictionaries:
A dog is a very common four-legged animal that is often kept by people as a pet or to guard or hunt. There are many different breeds of dog.
First, the entry is written in sentence form. It uses plain language that sounds as if someone is speaking to you. For this reason, the Collins and Longman dictionaries are the options I choose to use with students.
Let's think about that with regards to advent.
The entry for advent in Collins states that the advent of an important event is the start of it coming into existence. It gives us synonyms like approach, appearance, and arrival. Certainly we can now see its relationship to advent calendars, as they signal the approach of the Christmas holiday.
However, there is another definition below that where advent begins with a capital .
The Advent is the period of time between the Sunday closest to November 30 and Christmas Day. This period is celebrated in some churches for the anticipated arrival of Jesus's birth. It is considered the beginning of the liturgical, or church, year.
When teaching meaning, an important aspect is to use the word in as many different contexts as possible. There are several contexts outside of the Christmas season where we might use the word advent:
- With the advent of computerized databases and search engines, we saw the disappearance of the card catalog in many libraries.
- After Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and the Munich Agreement of 1938, the advent of war seemed inevitable.
Let's look at how this word was built.
|
Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
We often first approach this question by asking our students what their hypothesis is for how the word is built. This is their best guess at a word's base and other elements. It is often presented in the form of a word sum.
ad + vent
Then we ask them to justify their choice of elements. Certainly, we have seen advertise and adjourn. This prefix is from a Latin preposition with a sense of "towards." Prefixes can have some lexical weight, but they lend it to the base. In several words, the prefix doesn't have a sense of "towards," like in adrenal where it is more like "near" or admonish where it may be more frequentative. (Frequentatives are words of repeated action.)
We often see the prefixal Assimilated prefixes have a final letter that is more phonologically harmonious with the beginning letter of the next element it attaches to. In many instances these letters are the same, as in afford or acceptable. In some instances, they are simply compatible, as with the prefix impact.
The prefix allomorphs, depending on its environment. In words with bases starting with aspect, it simply has the form . In many cases, after passing through French (a journey we often colloquially refer to as Frenchifying), the
Back to our word advent. Let's visit Etymonline to attest the elements in our hypothesis.
The entry in Etymonline says the word was attested first in 1742 as an extension of the more formal Advent season. With an Etymonline entry, I teach my students to "follow the froms" to find the earliest attested root. Here our word is from a past participle of advenire. And then from ad + venire. This is not a word sum. We must look at the proposed root of the base and determine the English base.
The Latin word venire is a verb. We can see this from the infinitive ending Latin infinitives often end in <-are>, <-ire>, or <-ere>. Latin infinitives are also known as the "second principal part" of a Latin verb. When we remove the infinitive ending, we have a possible English base. Here, we have
Turns out, English bases may also come from the fourth principal part. To find the fourth principal part, you may use a tool like Lat-Dict, an online Latin dictionary. If we go there, and make sure the tool is set to "Latin to English." When we type in venire, we get the four principal parts: venio, venire, veni, ventus. The fourth principal part will often end in <-us> or <-um>. If we remove that Latin suffix, we have advent.
The advent of something tells us its "nearly coming."
|
Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
At this point, we've covered a lot of ground about the English orthographic system. This takes a lot longer to read than to do alongside students, so don't get too overwhelmed. And of course, I pick and choose which aspects of our system to illustrate or dive into depending on the student I have in front of me.
My earlier questions centered on the word advent being related to vent or adventure. In order to find that out, I have to look up those words in Etymonline and see if they also have the root of venire.
The word vent may be a noun or verb, so I shall read both entries. When I follow the froms for the verb vent, it seems to be derived from the Latin ventus, "wind." The entry for the noun vent also leads back to this root. Be cautious. Looks can be deceiving.
The story is different with adventure. It also is derived from venire. Therefore advent and adventure are morphological relatives, or words that share the same spelling of the base and the same root. The last paragraph in the entry explains a "missing" a
Knowing there are two possible venire and "coming," and one related to ventus and "wind," I must be cautious when constructing a matrix. I can include circumvent but not ventilate. I can include convention and inventory but not ventilation. We must be careful to prevent any errors when there are homographic bases.
|
Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
The graphemes in this word are all spelling expected pronunciations. Each grapheme is a single-letter grapheme.
advent
ædvɛnt
However, listen to and feel what happens with that adventure.
Do you hear /ʧ/?
I often ask students who have trouble hearing a sound to tell me what they are feeling instead. When we are pronouncing /ʧ/, the tip of our tongue is behind the front teeth, behind the alveolar ridge. I might ask, "Where is your tongue?"
That process is called palatalization. The palate is the roof of the mouth. When we palatalize some sounds, we move the tongue closer to the hard palate. Some refer to this as "softening," as in the term "soft vacation.
|
Next Steps
What concepts from this investigation can we explore next to learn more about the English orthographic system?
|
Many of our words come from religion, like advent. What other words have come from this area but have taken on different everyday meanings? |
|
A study of assimilated prefixes would be worth looking into. |
|
What other homographic bases are out where we might be cautious? As you and your students study words, you can keep a running list. |
Turns out this investigation opened many doors to explore in the English orthographic system. Each door holds a sweet surprise for your students. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by opening all the doors at once, just choose the one that sparks curiosity for you and and your students. Let that be the next step.
Stay curious,
Brad
Join the community!
PS. Now surely one of your colleagues would enjoy learning more about palatalization, assimilated prefixes, or Latin infinitives. Forward this on to them. And if someone forwarded this email to you, go here to learn more: Posts | Discover how spelling works in only five minutes a week.
PPS. A Arrive contains an interesting metaphor in its history.
|
|
|
|
