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Do you remember the show "Kids Say the Darndest Things?" Begun on Art Linkletter's show in the 1950s, the television program featured kids who shared anecdotes and offered funny explanations about common items or relationships. Hosted by various celebrities through the years, a bevy of precocious kids were featured.
What is the base on precocious?
During this investigation, we'll look at the company a word keeps, or its collocations. We will look at the consonant doubling convention and its relationship to a connecting vowel letter. We will also take another look at palatalization and a different consonant letter.
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Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
Diving right into the dictionary entry for precocious, we learn that these children "are often clever, mature or good at something in a way you expect to find in an adult." The entry gives us synonyms like advanced and developed.
Our word functions as an adjective. Adjectives are used to modify nouns.
Some nouns it commonly appears with are child, development, and talent. These pairings are often referred to as collocations, and they can help anchor a word in a student's memory.
It may also be paired with these adverbs:
- highly precocious
- quite precocious
- rather precocious
One you probably won't use in class is "sexually precocious."
Students can practice writing sentences with collocations, rather than solo words. Students might do a matching activity or an odd-one-out task.
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Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
A few weeks ago, we looked at the word rambunctious with a connecting vowel letter and the suffix <-ous>. This word appears to have a similar construction.
precoc + i + ous
I'm going to hypothesize that is also a prefix in this word. After all, someone who is precocious is "before" their time. The prefix lends this sense in words like preview and predetermine.
pre + coc + i + ous
The sequence consonant doubling convention if a vowel suffix is added afterwards. A connecting vowel letter does not trigger doubling, even if it does replace a single final picnicking).
But let's see if this is really our potential base by checking out Etymonline to find its origin.
The entry for precocious in Etymonline tells us the word was originally used with plants. The root appears to be Latin noun praecox which is from the Latin verb coquere. If I remove the Latin infinitive ending <-ere> from that verb, I have adopted and then adapted to the adoptee's orthographic system. I'm going to double back to the genitive form from the Latin noun praecocis. When deriving the English base from a Latin noun, we remove the genitive suffix
pre + coc + i + ous
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Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
You can find relatives for your base by typing in the root in the search engine of Etymonline. When I put coquere in the search engine, I get words like decoction, which has to do with "boiling." The base here is concoct.
Other words that are related etymologically include apricot, biscuit, charcuterie, cook, cuisine, culinary, kitchen, pumpkin and even ricotta and terra-cotta. All of these words have a connection to that orthographic denotation of "cooking." A terra-cotta vase is even made of "baked earth."
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Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
Just as we saw with rambunctious, we see palatalization. Palatalization can happen in the articulation between a consonant and a high front vowel. This time, the musician. It also happens with the suffix in the word coercion.
I've seen my students have another spelling confusion with words that have the prefix . When said in connected text, this prefix can sound like the prefixes
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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 working with collocations and let me know what you think. |
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Have you introduced your students to the consonant doubling suffixing convention yet? What if the word is more than one syllable? Stress matters. (Big Idea #5) |
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You might spend time distinguishing the prefixes , |
When I introduce to students, I often use basic words to help them see the meaning the prefix lends to the base it's attached to. I use words like preview or preheat or even precook. And it makes me smile to think in some sense, a precocious child is a "pre-cooked" child.
Stay curious,
Brad
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PS. Every week, these same investigations are posted earlier, accompanied by resources in my community, Creating English Orthographers (CEO) Check it out and subscribe at the link underneath my photo.
PPS. If you know the words bicycle and bisect, then you know the prefix
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