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Another phrase from Tim Alberta's "The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory" has prompted my curiosity: “vicious internecine fighting.” Many things about a word will prompt my curiosity. Sometimes I'm not exactly sure what the word means. Sometimes, the word seems to have an odd base. Sometimes I might wonder about a relationship to other familiar words or wonder about a word's language of origin. I try to cultivate this same curiosity in my students.
In this word, I see some familiar elements that make me curious what the base might be. Come with me as we learn about a word with few relatives that would go in a matrix but lots of interesting etymological relatives.
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Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
I've seen where a teacher might ask a student a word's meaning or ask them to copy some dictionary definition, and then move on. If I wanted to do that here, the entry in the Collins dictionary tells me that internecine describes a "conflict, war, or quarrel is one which takes place between opposing groups within a country or organization."
Even as student-friendly as the definitions in the Collins CoBuild dictionary are, I work with students who would struggle with that entry. What is a quarrel? What do you mean, "takes place between opposing groups?" They might not catch the word within, which contrasts it with other terms used to describe conflicts.
- When siblings fight, is that internecine?
- When two co-workers are gunning for the retiring CEO's job, is that internecine?
Asking questions about that will help students understand the definition of a word better than copying from a dictionary or "using it in a sentence" like:
She fought in an internecine quarrel.
That sentence shows nothing about the student's understanding of internecine other than they associate it with quarrels. If you get students who give you empty sentences like that, you can try asking questions like the above and then posing the question, "Is that an example of word?"
More than the definition, however, this first question includes how the word functions in connected texts. Along with dictionary definitions, endless word lists of vocabulary or spelling words isn't helping our cause either.
From the phrase in Alberta's book, I can see that this word is functioning as an adjective to modify fighting. I can also see the word is an adjective when I look at the Collins entry, but that doesn't help me understand my passage. There is something about fighting that can be internecine or not.
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Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
If I know that interactive or intermission, then I might spot it easily on internecine as well. In all of these words there is a sense of "between" which this element lends to its base.
inter + necine
I'm wondering about the entries. The second entry we can squash right away for this word, as it is a suffix used in chemistry. The first entry tells us this suffix, also found on words like divine or feminine can be used to form adjectives and has a history in French, but is ultimately derived from a few Latin suffixes. I can't simply propose that
Then, let's turn to the entry for internecine. This word came to English in the 1600s with a sense of "deadly; destructive" which is its denotation in the Latin internecinus. Aha! I see the <-inus> historical root of a suffix <-ine> in English.
inter + nece/ + ine
What is our base necare, "kill." To go from a Latin verb to an English base, I can remove the infinitive suffix, <-are>, to arrive at our English base
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Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
Are you thinking of other relatives with this base that share a root, necare, and the base internecinally might show as an adverbial form.
However, the etymological relatives that derive from the PIE root are interesting. Even the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root had a sense of "death." From there we get words like necrophiliac, which is from the Greek nekros, or "dead corpse." We also have other variations from Latin like pernicious, obnoxious, and even innocent. We have the French variant nuisance. There is also a relationship to nectar and nectarines. "Death and Nectarines" sounds like a great title for a heavy metal album.
With a student, I might then ask how each of those relatives are still related to this idea of "death." We may find that the Greek Gods drunk the nectar that helped them overcome death. These vivid connections help cement a spelling in the mind far more than copying a definition out of a dictionary.
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Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
If you go back to the entry in Collins, it will allow you to listen to both the British and American pronunciations of internecine. In both versions, the sign, whereas the Americans pronounce it as /i:n/. In the British pronunciation, it is clearer that the suffix is spelled with an <i>. </i>
In addition, the British pronunciation, does not rhotacize the vowel in the first element,
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Next Steps
What can we learn next about the English orthographic system?
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How do your students adopt vocabulary? From Ausubel's meaningful learning, we know that students retain concepts better when they are related to something in the student's direct world. Certainly many squabbles between siblings could help with this word, but what about others? |
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The first element inside and invoke?
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What are the conditions for the palatalization of
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Stay curious,
Brad
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