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The book, Original Sins, by Eve Ewing is about the development of American schools to advance white intellectual superiority. In this study, she uses the phrase “affront to sovereignty.“ Although I was familiar with the possible base of the word, it was the other elements in the word I found intriguing. Maybe we will also get around to the old " before
In this investigation you'll discover how a derivational suffix transforms word classes, encounter a suffixal construction that creates nouns from adjectives, and see how folk etymology shapes some of our spellings. We'll also explore etymological relatives that connect this word to a surprising family tree. We'll also learn what syncope looks like in action, and understand why the "i before e" rule may not be the best way to teach spelling.
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Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
When I encounter the word sovereignty, it is usually in the context of royalty, discussing kings and queens and royal courts. Sometimes we can have a narrow sense of the meaning of a word when all of our experiences are within one context. Our students can also have a narrow sense of a word's meaning.
The definition from the Collins dictionary online, my favorite resource for student-friendly definitions, is "the power that a country has to govern itself or another county or state." Synonyms include domination, supremacy, and primacy. The word is a noun.
One way nouns can be classified is by concrete or abstract. Concrete nouns are nouns that are tangible. When we define a noun solely as a "person, place, or thing," we refer to concrete nouns. Sovereignty is an abstract noun. Abstract nouns represent ideas or concepts, like love, freedom, mystery, or patience. These are more difficult, so we occasionally say a noun is a "person, place, thing or idea."
There are other ways to help define nouns. One way is that nouns can be pluralized. We can have the freedom of assembly, or we can have the many freedoms outlined in the Constitution. Our entry for sovereignty, however, tells us it's an uncountable noun. Uncountable nouns are not pluralized.
Another test we can use to determine if a word is a noun versus another word class, is what I will call the Definite Article Test. Can the word under discussion appear after the word the?
- We are determined to protect the sovereignty of our nation.
And yet there is another way to see that our word is a noun...
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Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
Derivational suffixes can change a word's class. We start with a noun like boy and we add a derivational suffix like <-ish> to arrive at boyish, an adjective. However, they do not always change the word's class. For example, if we add the derivational suffix <-hood> to our base, we have boyhood, which is still a noun.
I hypothesize there's a derivational suffix on our word sovereignty:
sovereign + ty
I know the word sovereign, "independent." I also know there is a derivational suffix <-ty> that creates nouns from adjectives, like in loyalty and safety. This same suffix appears after a connecting vowel letter in words like activityand sanity. The adjectives active and sane become nouns. We call <-ity> a suffixal construction. A suffixal construction is made up of more than one element. Another example would be the combination of the <-ate> and <-ion> suffixes we see in words like vacation.
Looking back at my hypothesized word sum, I also know that reign is a word as well.
sove + reign + ty
A king or queen reigns over their land; therefore, semantically, there seems to be a connection to sovereignty, but that doesn't necessarily mean this is the base here. In addition, there's still the
In the Etymonline entry for sovereignty, we see it was once spelled quite differently, soverain. Although we know that French is a daughter language of Latin, I see no mention of Latin in this entry. I also still need to see if sovereign can be further analyzed. Let's look at the link for that word.
And at that entry, we see there are entries for a noun form and an adjective form. At the noun entry, we learn that the spelling was influenced by folk etymology with the word reign. Folk etymology is when a word is changed as a result of being similar to something more familiar.
For example, the term ultrage from French is a combination of outrage. There is a similarity in pronunciation, even though this word is not related to rage.
Let's turn to the adjective entry. There, we see that the word came from Vulgar Latin. Vulgar Latin was the "Latin of the common people." The asterisk before the word indicates this word is unattested in print. Although there are some written records of Vulgar Latin, much of it has been reconstructed too. The entry says that the word was from Latin super. This is the same super that is a free base in English today.
Since the
sovereign + ty
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Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
What other words have nonsovereign. (All prefixes are derivational in English.) We could also add the agent suffix <-ist> and have sovereignist. Agent suffixes create words that are the person or thing "doing" the base. We could add the <-ize> suffix to make a verb, sovereignize.
In the Etymonline entry for sovereign, adj., you may have noticed a hot link for the Proto-Indo-European form that is the root for our word. The Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, language, is reconstructed, and we cannot use it to gain orthographic evidence. However, we can look to find etymological relatives, relatives that come from an earlier root.
This PIE root, which gave us the relative super, also gives us the relatives over, somersault, summit, superior, and supreme.
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Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
Our word sovereignty has three syllables when pronounced. The first syncope. Syncope is the deletion of sounds in the interior of a word. It happens often with unstressed vowels, as it does with the in family and the first different.
I promised I would talk about the " before reign.
However, relying on "rules" like this can often lead us astray. In addition, many of my students have memory issues, so I try to give them things to memorize as little as possible. Instead we look for meaningful connections to word families. The vowel in the sovereignty is actually unstressed and pronounced like schwa, /ə/.
My students are much more likely to remember the folk etymology relationship to reign and that reign is related to words like regal and regime, where the
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Next Steps
What concepts from this investigation can we explore next to learn more about the English orthographic system?
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Have you studied concrete and abstract nouns with your students? |
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How do derivational suffixes change a word's class? |
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Begin collecting examples of syncope. What syllables are "missing?" Why might those syllables be "missing" instead of another? |
Who would have thought that the sovereignty was a result of folk etymology? This reminds me that language is wonderfully messy, shaped not just by historical sound changes and etymology but by the very human tendency to make sense of unfamiliar words by linking them to what we already know.
Stay curious,
Brad
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P.S. I'd love to hear what you learned from this investigation! And forward it to a colleague to see what they learn as well!
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