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I've taught many teachers and many students about hybrid words, but I've never considered investigating the word hybriditself. Wouldn't it be interesting if it ended up being a hybrid word?
While we explore, we'll look at how content area vocabulary from science and social studies can spawn an investigation. Not only will we touch on Greek literary concepts, but we will cruise by the history of the alphabet a bit too, including a letter we lost.
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Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
I believe I was first exposed to the word hybrid when talking about Mendel's pea plants in freshman biology class. Do you remember drawing Punnet squares to see which genes were passed on? Would the peas be wrinkled or smooth? Regardless, some were PP, others were pp and it was a 50-50 chance, they would be Pp. Then we figured out what would happen with a cross between a PP and a hybrid, or Pp.
Animals can be hybrid too. I once had a cockapoo, a hybrid of a cocker spaniel and a poodle. A cross between a Maltese and a Yorkshire terrier is affectionately known as a Morkie.
The definition from the entry in Collins Dictionary states that a hybrid is "an animal or plant that has been bred from two different species of animal or plant." The entry also says that you can use hybrid to refer to any mixture of two things. A third definition is provided specifically to refer to hybrid cars, cars that use both a traditional engine and electricity to run.
If you scroll down to the British English set of definitions, the fourth definition is where we see hybrid words. "A word, a part of which is derived from one language and part from another." Hybrid words include television, a hybrid of claustrophobia, from the Latin claustrum and Greek phobia.
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Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
To determine the elements that make up our word, we turn to Etymonline. The entry there tells us this word didn't enter the lexicon until c. 1600 from the Latin hybrida, a variant of ibrida, "mongrel." There is a suggestion that the word was probably Greek originally, but no root is listed. If we remove the , we have our word fully formed. It is a free base.
The suggestion is that the word is related to the Greek hubris, "pride," which I first learned about in literature class in high school.
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Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
The word hybrid can be affixed to give us hybridity and its synonym hybridism, which is simply referring to being a hybrid. We can also refer to a plant or animal's hybridness. We can also derive verbs with hybridize.
If it is indeed related to hubris, then we could put that word and hubristically in the etymological circle that surrounds our
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Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
The medial typical and rhyme, both containing bases from Greek.
The igrec. In Greece it was known as upsilon. Like many letters, the Greeks borrowed it from the Phoenician.
Its pronunciation was not a native sound for Latin speakers; it was more like the French . In English, the
In English, we had the letter yogh, which looks like a backwards three, to spell the consonant sound of Ye Olde Shoppe," although it was never pronounced with that consonant sound.
(Source: Language Visible by David Sacks)
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Next Steps
What can we learn next about the English orthographic system?
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What other hybrid words can you and your students discover?
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Gather up words with the letter phonemes it can spell. Is there a pattern to when the |
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Did you know that you can look individual letters up in Etymonline? You and your students may enjoy other historical investigations into the letters of our alphabet.
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Stay curious,
Brad
One Step Now Education onestepnoweducation.com
Creating English Orthographers (CEO) Community
https://creating-english-orthographers.circle.so/
P.S. My favorite thing ever is reading replies to these investigations when someone shares something they learned. Or better yet, something they already knew but appreciated being reminded of. Best? Stories of students the investigation triggered. So reply to this email and let me know, eh?
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