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The holiday of April Fool's Day may have started in 16th century France when King Charles IX changed New Year from Easter to January 1st. Therefore, if you continued to celebrate the new year in April, you were the "April Fool."
"Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing"--Anton Chekhov
You may find as you practice scientific word study that the more you go along the less you know. I've been at this for nearly ten years now, and I'm still discovering new stuff all of the time. For instance, what is the base of this word charlatan? And is the <-an> the same suffix we see on American and Canadian?
As you read through this investigation, you'll discover how collocations, words that frequently occur together, can help students build richer mental networks around a word's meaning. You'll also encounter a demonym, a term for words that indicate a person from a certain place, and see how suffixes like <-an> can function in this role. Along the way, you might find yourself surprised by what the pronunciation of a digraph can reveal about a word's journey from another language into English.
Off we go! (and hopefully not on a fool's errand)
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Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
Sometimes we know what things are by discovering what things are not. How is a charlatan different from a fool? When I asked Google, the AI responded with, "A charlatan is a deliberate deceiver while a fool is someone who lacks good judgement or sense, without intending to harm others."
Collins says, "a charlatan pretends to have skills or knowledge they do not possess."
As I work out a general sense of this word, I might visit collocations, or the occurrences of two words together. People are often "exposed" as a charlatan. There are "political" charlatans and "opportunistic" charlatans. They might lurk in similar contexts as quacks, frauds, and scams.
Comparing and contrasting with similar terms like fool and looking at collocations help build rich neural networks for encoding the meaning of the word in the student's memory and building multiple pathways for retrieval.
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Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
So does this word have the same suffix we find in words like American, Canadian or even Mexican?
charlat + an
The suffix <-an> can be used to indicate a person from a certain place, otherwise known as a demonym. Other suffixes that can create demonyms include <-er> (Londoner) and <-ese> (Japanese).
If this is the case, then I'm left to wonder if my base is
The entry for charlatan there shows the following journey:
Fr. charlatan
Italian ciarlatano
Italian ciarlare
Italian ciarla "chat; prattle"
So it looks like it came to us from French completely intact. This word cannot be analyzed. Some might label it a loanword. The connection to "chat; prattle" is appropriate, given the nature of a charlatan selling his "supposed" knowledge.
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Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
Someone could practice charlatanism, and that word would be a relative of charlatan. Someone may also be charlatanish. We could describe someone as charlatanic or charlatanical. We even have the noun charlatanship, describing the practices of a charlatan. Notice each time that we added derivational suffixes like <-ism>, <-ish>, <-ic>, and <-ship> to expand our word family.
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Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
The pronunciation of the digraph chef, chandelier, and mustache have the digraph pronounced as /ʃ/. Words like choir and echo, where the digraph is pronounced /k/ are indicative of Greek origin.
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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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Try using collocations in your work on the first question with students. |
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What other demonyms can you find? Do you see any other common suffixes to add to the list? |
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As I was conducting my investigation, I discovered something interesting in the ngram for the word charlatanat the bottom of the Etymonline entry. This word steadily grew in popularity in the 1800s until it hit a peak around the turn of the century. Again, though, the turn of the 21st century brought a resurgence in its use. Historically, in America, the end of the 1800s brought the Gilded Age, and there are some who have said America may currently be living through a Gilded Age of sorts. All I'm going to say to that is good luck to all of you and hopefully you don't get hoodwinked by a charlatan!
Stay curious,
Brad
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PS. A loanword often announces itself, because we spot spellings that we don't ordinarily allow in English. The
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