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Continuing the trend of familiar words of which I'm unsure of the meaning, we have piquant. Now I know piquant is usually brought up in the context of food or a smell. I'm hypothesizing a French origin, due to the
As we investigate, we will learn more about colloquial uses of words and the functions of adjectives. We will also understand etymological relatives and how we can show them with an etymological circle. We'll also take a peek at the grapheme-phoneme correspondences for the digraph homophonic suffixes.
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Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
When you look up the entry for piquant in the Collins dictionary, you see that this word has a sense of "pleasantly spicy" or "interesting; exciting." Example sentences talk about a piquant salad dressing or mustard.
Synonyms include biting, sharp, stinging, spirited, and stimulating. There are also informal synonyms like zip and kick. Our formal definitions of zip and kick have more to do with zipping up a jacket or kicking a ball.
Informally, these words have a different sense. We might refer to this as colloquial, and these senses are often difficult for students for whom English is not their native language.
Our word is classified as an adjective. Adjectives modify nouns. They may also complement verbs.
- The chicken breast was covered with a piquant sauce.
- The details of their break-up were piquant.
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Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
If I'm proposing an <-ant> suffix, I'm left with:
pique/ + ant
Now we might be getting somewhere. I know the word pique is a free base in English. A free base is a word that can stand on its own without affixes. I know that someone's interest can be piqued by information. Let's look at Etymonline just to be sure of our hypothesized word sum.
The entry in Etymonline tells me that when the word was adopted in English, it originally meant "sharp or stinging to the feelings." Meanings drift over time. It also says it is the present participle of piquer, "to prick." That verb is French. Latin infinitives** end in <-are>, <-ere>, or <-ire> typically. Similarly, French verbs end in <-er>, <-re> or <-ir>. I can remove the infinitive suffix to arrive at our English base of
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Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
The entry then asks me to "see pike (n.1)." In most dictionaries, nouns and verbs that are spelled similarly have separate entries. In Etymonline, there are four entries for a noun pike. The first entry can be traced back to a French word or perhaps a Celtic source. The French word is spelled similarly to our word and shows the same root. So pike and piquantare from the same roots, but they do not share the same base. Therefore, pike could go inside of an etymological circledrawn around our matrix for the base etymological relatives include pick, perhaps picnic, and even pink, the sense of "piercing" used in pinking shears. The color pink may also be related.
Our matrix would include pique and piquing. We could include the noun form of piquant, piquancy. We could add the suffix <-ly> to get piquantly.
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Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
The most interesting grapheme phoneme correspondence here may be the digraph mannequin and mosquito. We can also see the correspondence in words from French like conquer or in words with the French form of the <-ic> suffix, like physique or antique. If you look at the word liquor, you can see that in Old French, the word was licor, but we restored the liquere, "be fluid."
Typically, the <-ant> suffix and its <-ent> form are homophonic and pronounced with a schwa. Our word piquant, however, is pronounced with an /a:/.
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Next Steps
What can we learn next about the English orthographic system?
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What might be other words where the informal, or colloquial definitions, differ from the formal definition in the dictionary? |
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What are the functions of the suffixes <-ant> and <-ent>? Do they always form adjectives? |
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What are other words where the |
Stay curious,
Brad
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P.S. To find out more about affixes and their origins, you can try looking them up in Etymonline. Just include a hyphen after a prefix or before a suffix. For example, here is the entry for <-ant>. Not all affixes are listed in Etymonline. Just like words, affixes can be investigated using the four questions. Part of attesting the affix in a word is finding its history. And just because something looks like an affix doesn't mean it necessarily is. Looks can be deceiving.
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