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What are your spelling bugaboos?
Aluminum? Cinnamon? Accommodate?
One of mine is amalgam, because in truth, I thought it was *amalgamam. I mean, that's how I said it.
I was typing it in a document, and I got the red wavy line, so I decided to look it up.
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Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
According to the entry in the Collins Co-Build Dictionary, my favorite resource for student-friendly definitions, an amalgam is a mixture of two or more things.
The word functions as a noun. Nouns can be made plural, but in our dictionary entry, one sense is listed as an "uncountable noun." In this definition, amalgam refers to a specific mixture of mercury and another metal. You may have a few in your mouth, as these are use to make dental fillings.
Uncountable nouns are nouns that we cannot make plural. We do not typically pluralize words like air, food, or knowledge.
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Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
Every word is or has a base. The base carries the primary lexical meaning of the word. We can affix other elements to our base to influence the meaning. What other elements might make up this word?
Nothing is immediately recognizable to me. I'm thinking this word is a free base, meaning it can stand alone as a word without any prefixes or suffixes.
I'm wondering about its origin and if it is from Arabic languages, due to its similarity to words like algebra or imam.
An etymological dictionary is where I would look next. The etymological dictionary will trace a word back to its origins, but it will not necessarily give us the structural elements. It is incumbent upon us to know how to take a root and possibly derive the English base.
The entry in Etymonline says this word came to us c. 1400. I often explain the little
We can see the word first came to us from Old French amalgame and Medieval Latin amalgama. The entry goes on to explain that the word is "probably" from Arabic al-malgha, which was a poultice put on sores. So my hypothesis of the word's origin was right.
The entry doesn't stop there, however. That word may have come from Greek malagma, a noun derived from malassein, a verb, which itself is derived from a Greek adjective malakos, "soft." Although there has been some transposition of letters during this journey from Greek to Arabic to Latin to French to English, I think it's safe to say that this word cannot be analyzed into more than one element. Elements that may have been obvious at one time, like the fossilized" so they can no longer be pulled apart.
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Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
We can add a few suffixes on to our word to get other words that are part of the morphological family. We can add <-ate> to get amalgamate and <-ize> to get amalgamize. We can extend amalgamate by adding <-ion>, amalgamation. In fact, the word amalgamate may be a back-formation of amalgamation. A back-formation is when suspected suffixes are removed to obtain a new word, such as how we formed edit from editor. Affixation is not the only way we form words.
If we trace our word back to its Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root, we see relationships to bland and blandish, alongside words like enamel. The PIE root gave birth to the Latin mollire, "soften," which gives us words like emollient and mollusk. We even have a relationship to Aunt Mildred. We have smelt and melt which may have developed into the Yiddish word for "melted fat," schmaltz.
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Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
Part of a word's phonology is its syllabicity. Although not terribly helpful orthographically, a word's syllables in English will be a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables. In unstressed syllables, the vowel is reduced, often to what we call schwa, which is the mid-central vowel. The vowel is called mid-central, because it is directly in the center of the vowel quadrangle. Other vowels are pronounced with the ball of the tongue further to the front or back of the mouth cavity and either higher or lower to the mouth cavity.
Our word is three syllables, with the second syllable receiving stress. Therefore the <a> in the first syllable and the </a><a> in the last syllable will be reduced to schwa: </a>
əˈmælgəm
The /æ/ is the IPA symbol for what you may know as "short <a>." However, it may be "colored" a bit by the following </a>
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Next Steps
What can we learn next about the English orthographic system?
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How many uncountable nouns can you or your students brainstorm? Are they abstract or concrete?
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What are other words that are of Arabic origin? (think
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Speaking of schwa, there is an interesting set of words in which shifting the stress creates a different word. Examples include record (album) and record (a sound). What are other words in this set? |
When we bravely admit to our students that we have our own spelling bugaboos, their stance towards spelling may just soften to realize that spelling can be challenging for everyone at times.
Stay curious,
Brad
P.S. The Arabic language is not a member of the Proto-Indo-European word family like English and the Romance languages. Instead it is a member of the Afro-Asiatic word family, which includes languages like Egyptian and Semitic. These language families may have had contact through trading across the Mediterranean Sea and/or colonization of northern Africa. Arabic influence on the Spanish language may be due to the Muslim occupation from 711-1492.
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