|
It's Academy Awards time this Sunday, and the favorite to take home the Oscar for Best Picture is "One Battle After Another," starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
I began wondering about the word battle. Where did it come from? What is its base? Could it be
Before we begin, let's pause to look at our roadmap. We will discover things about nouns, verbs, and determiners. We'll take a look through history at Gaul and Classical vs. Late Latin. We will stop off and learn something about frequentatives and syllabic consonants. Then we'll wind it up by peeking at double consonant letters and the doubling suffixing convention.
|
Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
Many times with students, I'll ask them about the context where they know a word. When I think of this word, I immediately think of war. I think of wars of the past; there are many famous battles from the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and even World War II had the Battle of the Bulge, but I don't hear much use of the term battle in modern wars. I hear more about scourges, offensives, and skirmishes.
Of course, a battle can refer to other conflicts as well. You may be battling with your in-laws. You might battlean illness. And those of us of a certain age might remember The Battle of the Network Stars.
Collins gives us several definitions in the entry for battle. The first entry is related to the war examples I gave above: "a violent fight...especially between military forces during a war." The second, "a conflict in which different groups of people compete in order to achieve success or control" may refer to that battle with the in-laws or between the network stars. The last noun definition tells me you can use battle to "refer to someone's efforts to achieve something in very difficult circumstances" like in the illness examples above.
This word can be a noun or a verb. If you are "battling your in-laws" or "an illness," you are using it as a verb. I know it can be a verb, because it takes the verbal inflectional paradigm: battles, battled, battling.
In the title of the movie, "One Battle After Another," the word is being used as a noun. I know this, because nouns can be preceded by determiners. The word determiners. Determiners is a functional word class. They are words that tell us which one or how many, such as this, these, my, our, some, many, and the articles a, an and the.
|
Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
I was curious to discover if this word had a base related to
bat + le
Now, there's the question of the second
batt + le
Let's check Etymonline to see if we can find out more information.
The entry in Etymonline tells me this word has been with us since the Middle English period, around 1300 and came from Old French battaille. However, the Old French received the word from Latin battuere, "to beat or strike." I'm then directed to see batter. Let's follow that link.
The entry for batter says it entered in early 14th century. It's also from Latin battuere, although the entry here shows an alternate spelling with only one Gaulish. The Gauls were a group of Celtic tribes who inhabited France and Belgium during the time of the Romans. In fact, the area we know as France was what the Romans referred to as Gaul. They often fought the Roman Empire until Caesar conquered them. Some of them fled to Britain. Their language was known as Gaulish.
I digress...
If I look at that Latin verb, battuere, and I remove the infinitive suffix
Sometimes when I'm puzzled I turn to Wiktionary.
The entry there tells me that the word had another journey in between Classical Latin battuere and Old French battaille. The word battalia, from Late Latin, is a variant of battualia, "fighting or fencing exercises." Now we see that there are variants all the way back in Latin without the that must have been accounted for when the word battaille was formed in Old French. I believe our word is
batt + le
An frequentatives. Frequentatives are words that show an action that is done repeatedly. They occur more often in Latin, but there are a few in English as well. An <-le> can be a frequentative suffix in words like crackle (repeated cracking) and sparkle (repeated sparking). So that would mean a battle would be "repeated batting." If we think of batting as "striking; hitting," then I think we may just have ourselves a frequentative.
batt + le
|
Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
We could include battler and embattled. We have compounds like battleground, battleship, battlefield, and battleaxe. What about batten, as in "batten down the hatches?" Turns out that's related to baton, which is from Latin bastum, "stout staff."
The word battle is related to other words that have battle and bat would not be in the matrix together, because they do not share the same base, according to this hypothesis. We might include combat and combative. I'd put battery in this matrix, because the
But what about acrobat? Turns out that is related to a Greek root with a sense of "one that goes." The acrobat is "one that goes topmost."
How about Batman? Could the Caped Crusader, named after the animal bat, be part of a bat has an origin in Old Norse.
If we go back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE), our word is also related to beat and butt, both common "striking" terms. Our word is also related to abut and buttress. Interesting, another etymological relative is button.
|
Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
This word has six letters and is comprised of four or five phonemes. The hat. A double consonant letter is fairly reliably showing the reader that the previous vowel has its "short" sound.
The syllabic consonant. A syllabic consonant is a consonant that acts as the nucleus of a syllable. Syllabic consonants can be hanger), prism), or button). In orthography, we often will put an prism).
Others may consider that there is a schwa plus
|
Next Steps
What concepts from this investigation can we explore next to learn more about the English orthographic system?
|
Perhaps it's time for you and your students to do a deep dive into determiners? |
|
Can you think of other frequentatives with |
|
A double letter consonant may indicate a previous vowel is "short," but that doesn't mean all "short" vowels will be followed by a double consonant. Witness the following pairs: rabbit/habit, wagon/dagger. One next step would be to go over the doubling suffixing convention with either one or two-syllable words |
So who will win on Sunday? Will it be "One Battle After Another?" Could it be "Marty Supreme? (supreme being related to super)" Maybe it will be Shakespeare's Hamnet (a variant of the name Hamlet) or Ryan Coogler's Sinners where Michael B. Jordan plays twins. Did you spot the doubled consonant letter again in the title of that movie? Regardless of which movie wins, I hope you'll get a chance to get to your local theater soon and catch a movie. You just never know what kind of word investigations they might inspire.
Stay curious,
Brad
Sign up for the newsletter!
Join the community!
PS. I have a few resources on determiners and frequentatives inside the Creating English Orthographers community. In fact, there are lots of activities, videos, graphics, and games in our resource section. Go here to subscribe.
PPS. In Latin, frequentatives often had a
PPPS. Remember to register for the course I teach with Dr. Jennifer Petrich, Connecting the D.O.T.S.: Integrating Scientific Word Study into Your Practice. For more information, go here.
|
|
|
|
