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When you have been doing this work for a while, a word will come up in your reading and a flood of possible relatives surface one after another. Isn't this what we are hoping happens with our students? I want my students to see a word like affluent in their reading, and suddenly words like influence, fluid, and fluent pop into their head. We do this when we teach by family and not by arbitrary shared grapheme or phoneme features.
When I saw vigilance, I immediately thought of holding a candlelight vigil and a Wild West vigilante. Could these words be related? And if so, what is the orthographic denotation they all share?
Not only will we learn about orthographic denotation in this investigation, we will also learn about derivatives. We will use our follow the froms strategy for examining an Etymonline entry. We will also look at attested and unattested forms and their relationship to reconstructed forms. We will also take a look at the palatalization of we don't have to analyze completely, only accurately.
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Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
Mostly, students and I run into words to study when we are reading something together. If the word vigilance popped up in their reading, I might ask them what they think it means based on its context in the passage we are reading. We learn many words through context, which is why it's important to not isolate word study into lists of words or even word families, but to constantly link it back to actual reading and writing.
When I think of a vigil, I think of keeping watch over something. When I think of a vigilante, I think of criminality, so I'm perplexed by how these words might be related, and perhaps they are not.
The Collins dictionary entry tells me that vigilance is "the fact, quality, or condition of being vigilant." These types of definitions are like a dog chasing its tail, so I'll continue to forge ahead with the definition of vigilant. Before I do, though, I note a second definition telling me that it is also "being unable to sleep." This certainly keeps pace with my initial thinking about watchfulness, although I've never heard it used in a way related to insomnia.
The entry for vigilant says someone who is vigilant "gives careful attention to a particular problem or situation and concentrates on noticing any danger or trouble there might be." This is much lengthier and more specific than most definitions I've seen in Collins.
The word vigilant is the adjective form, and the word vigilance is its noun form. These two forms, adjective and noun, are hinting at the word's structure.
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Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
A word is built from a collection of written elements: bases, affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and connecting vowel letters. Let's take a look at our two words so far:
vigilance
vigilant
We can see that these two words share a
vigil + ance
The question, now, is, "Can the civil and fossil. Could it be:
vig + il + ance
Let's take a look at the entry for vigilance in Etymonline, the online etymology dictionary. When I "follow the froms" in that entry, the last attested "from" says it is from vigil, "watchful; awake." Following the froms is a strategy you can teach your students to find the root of an English word in an Etymonline entry. Simply highlight or underline each "from" in the entry and find the oldest attested form. That is your root.
Attested forms have historical written evidence we can verify; unattested forms do not. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots and most Vulgar Latin roots are unattested forms and will appear with an asterisk. Unattested forms cannot be used as orthographic evidence. Linguists have reconstructed these unattested forms based on comparative evidence looking at derivatives in the daughter languages.
Let's now follow the link for that entry to see if our word vigil can be analyzed further.
The entry for vigil tells me my word is from Anglo-French. This is the hybird of English and French that the Normans who invaded England spoke. The Normans are literally the "North Men" and were a subset of the Scandinavian Vikings. Of course, French is a daughter language of Latin, so the word can be traced back to the Latin vigil and ultimately to "a derivative of vigere." Derivatives are words that are created out of an existing one. In other words vigil was created out of vigere. Similarly, in English, we might create player out of play.
Since we know we can remove the Latin infinitive suffix <-ere> from vigere to achieve an English base, we could be left with
At this point, I might ask myself, "Is it worth it to analyze the word this far for the student I have in front of me?" Sometimes the relatives help me make the decision.
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Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
My investigation started by wondering if this word was related to vigil and vigilante. My first question has been answered. Our word vigilance seems to be a derivative of vigil, "watchful; awake." That part in quotes is the orthographic denotation of our base; the sense that all of our relatives will share from the root. All of our relatives will have something to do with being "awake." The way to discover if our other word is related is to do a search on Etymonline.
The entry for vigilante says this word entered our lexicon around 1856 from Spanish. Again, Spanish as a daughter language of Latin derived the word from vigil. Therefore, this word is related as well. The <-ante> is the Spanish version of our English <-ant>. We happen to pronounce the
One way to find relatives for your word family is to use Word Searcher. When I type
Right away, I'm hit with vigor, or vigour, if you're from across the Pond. The commonality of the word vigormight have me analyzing our word as vig + il + ance. If all of the words contained We do not have to analyze completely, only accurately.
This also allows me to include invigorate and vigorously in our matrix with vigilant and vigilance, but what about navigate, which also shows up in our search with circumnavigate? Not every match will be a relative. When we look at the Etymonline entry, we can see that the first base in this word is derived from Latin navis, or "ship." Therefore, the agere.)
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Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
The girl or get, so what gives?
Turns out these words have Germanic roots, either in Old English or Old Norse. The Late Latin period is where this palatalization, or "softening," began happening; therefore, words from an earlier time in English may not have inherited this pronunciation.
The other trouble students may have when spelling this word by sound only is with the suffix. The suffix <-ance> is homophonic with both <-ence> and the construction of <-ant> + <-s> (occupants) or <-ent> + <-s> (parents). The history on this one is murky. Originally, the <-ance> suffix was for words derived from Latin infinitives ending in <-are>, but the journey into French and English muddied the waters, as <-ance> began to be used even on words where the infinitive ended in <-ere>, like pendant and defendant. While the decision for <-ance> or <-ence> has been obscured, at least we can untangle from the suffixal constructions <-ants> and <-ents> by determining if the word is a plural or not.
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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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If you gave your students a base, how many words could they come up with they believe are derived from that base? Start with free bases and then work into bound bases from Latin. (Big Idea #7) |
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Have you taught your students the "follow the froms" strategy for finding the root in an Etymonline entry? (Big Idea #7) |
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See what you can work out from a large data set of <-ance> and <-ence> words. Are there any other patterns to notice? What word class do these suffixes derive? And how might they be related to <-ancy> and <-ency>? (Big Idea #4) |
After an investigation like this, I know my students will see words like invigorate and vigorous and will recall vigil and vigilante. More importantly, they will recall that orthographic denotation of "awake." When we start with meaning and then use structure to build a family around that meaning, vocabulary is more likely to stick than when we rely on shared graphemes or pronunciations as in traditional lists.
Stay curious,
Brad
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P.S. Are you looking to see how I work with students? Join myself and Dr. Jennifer Petrich in our course, Connecting the D.O.T.S.: Integrating Scientific Word Study into Your Practice. You can register here for early bird pricing. Classes start at the end of March!
P.P.S. The Spanish settlement of the western U.S. provided us with many words like vigilante. This is how many words ending in
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