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ENGLISH FROM THE ROOTS UP FOR CHILDREN
Joegil Lundquist
I love daffodils. I bought dozens of bulbs last summer, but in the busy opening of school in the autumn I forgot them. Then one evening in last November we went outside in the dark after dinner and hurriedly planted about 200 of them.
They came up, little by little, at their appointed times. I'll never forget that one spring morning when my husband and I came out the front door on the way to our respective jobs and saw the garden bursting - rejoicing with tall, brilliant yellow blossoms.
Nor will I forget the next morning, when we opened the door to find most of them lying flat on the ground. What had happened? Slugs? Neighborhood dogs? We stooped in dismay to examine the wreckage and realized what we had done. The tops of the bulbs showed above the ground; no firm soil was supporting the long green stems. The roots had nourished but couldn't support the growth. We had planted them in shallow earth.
We are doing the same thing with the English language. Why is it that, when it comes to reading and writing, Americans from the coast of New England to San Diego, particularly those in the strong, tall flower of youth, are falling down on the job? This problem, too, has something to do with roots.
Latin - good old Latin - taught early enough and in new ways, is a way out of the functional illiteracy that imprisons more than half the adult population in the United States today.
Latin - and classical Greek - are as vital to beginning vocabulary development as phonics is to reading.
We must exhume Latin and Greek from the dusty back hall of the foreign language department, where they have languished for generations. We have lamely conceded that once Latin has been learned there's nobody to talk to in Latin. We have gamely rehashed Caesar, echoed the ancient thunder of Cicero, meandered endlessly with Aeneas, plugged five declensions and four conjugations in the first year alone, and now and then pointed out - by the way - that some English derivatives of Latin and Greek are still in use today.
We must bring Latin and Greek out of the foreign language department and install them, rejuvenated and indigenous, in the English department, where they belong, and in the early elementary grades, where they can do some good.
Just as phonics helps children find out what words are, Latin and Greek help them figure out what words mean. Without an early working knowledge of these indispensable components of their language, children are handicapped in their ability to use words well.
Why do we put off until it is almost too late, or never provide the opportunity to cultivate understanding of the vivid, active imagery that confers power in the use of our language? Why do we postpone Latin until it coincides with the onset of puberty, a time when conflicting interests ensure that Latin will be far from uppermost in a student's mind?
Why do we spend years learning vocabulary as whole words rather than as sets of interchangeable parts?
We discourage students from taking risks with words for fear that they will choose incorrectly from among similar alternatives and commit ridiculous malapropisms. Being laughed at for misusing a word can cause an adolescent to settle for the simplest and least adventurous word, the current slang, the peer-approved argot.
As for Greek, we've locked it up forever. Just try to find classical Greek in a high school these days. But little children are right for Latin, ripe for it, reach out and snatch it, jump up and down learning it, giggle and make jokes about it. They collect Latin - and Greek - words like bottle caps and baseball cards, play with them, alphabetize them, tell their friends and families about them, spot them quickly in new words, act them out, love them, use them, own them.
We started teaching Latin and Greek vocabulary in second grade last year. For years we had taught Roman numerals and the Greek alphabet and had occasionally pointed out a Latin or Greek root when children asked the meaning of a word. This year, we devoted time each day to "Latin and Greek lessons," which included some history of the English language and also included dictionary searches for etymologies.
The classes began to come alive as they had never done before. Parents told us that their children were talking about what they were learning, sounding excited and pleased with themselves.
A good vocabulary is a strong element in a child's self-esteem. The more words children know, the less other people can talk over their heads and the taller they stand in their own eyes. Moreover, they can choose, among many words, the exact ones which express their thoughts and visions.
I had just put jacio, jactum on the board, explaining that they were different forms of the Latin word meaning "throw". The children copied them in large letters on index cards. On the back, they printed the meaning and a list of as many derivatives as we could come up with in class, calling out any "-ject" words they could think of.
Here's how class went one day last spring.
"Reject!"
"Great! Re- is 'back' and -ject is 'throw'- so it's 'throw back'," I answered. "Throw that fish back in the lake! He's too small. Reject him!"
Several boys leaped from their seats and started "rejecting" all of the imaginary small fish they had been harboring in their desks. (Five years later, in junior high school, they would feel self-conscious and foolish acting out word meanings with such abandon.) Giggles and pantomime reigned until someone else called out, "Project!"
"Throw forward," I countered, writing it on the board. "Your bow throws your arrow forward; your arrow is a projectile."
More children jumped up and began hauling arrows out of the make-believe quivers at their backs, filling the air with more arrows than Robin Hood's band could ever have mustered.
I ducked behind my desk and shouted, "Objection!"
They stopped and look mystified. I stood up, holding up my hand. clearly.
"We don't know what ob- means," said a girl in the second row.
"Let's look it up. Who wants to?"
"Objection," I said
"I will," said the baseball hat at the end of the first row, running to the big dictionary - Webster's Second Edition, the great unabridged, truly unambiguous dictionary. Everyone waited as he laboriously turned the large pages looking for the letter 0 section.
"O-b should be pretty soon after the O's begin," offered someone helpful in the back row.
"Ob-, a prefix meaning (a) To, toward, before, facing, as in 'obstacle', 'obverse'; (b) Against, in opposition to, as in "object."'
"Hey, objection!" several chimed in. "Throw against."
"There you go. I threw my hand up against all your arrows, remember?"
"Yeah, we were projecting, and you were objecting. That's neat."
A hand went up in the front row. "May I just" - the shoulders hunched as though he were taking a risk - "interject a comment?"
I could have hugged him, and later did. "Yes, sir, you certainly may throw something into this conversation. You have permission to interrupt."
"That means he's breaking into our talking," said the girl next to him, pleased with herself for remembering "ruptus".
"Yes. Good for you, Heidi. You really listened yesterday. But what is your interjected comment, Jon?"
"It's time for recess."
"So it is. We'll go on with this tomorrow. Study all these derivatives. They'll be on your spelling test."
"We already know how to spell them. Just put the parts together. It's cinchy."
"Yes, it is - when you know how."
These children were acquiring deep knowledge about words, using all their senses - seeing, hearing, speaking, and moving their bodies. They were beginning to grasp the metaphoric content of words like "objection", which are abstract and vague until the root idea, "throw," is clear. Our sessions involving Greek words were equally animated.
Very young children can perceive the concrete idea underlying the derivative word and can visualize precisely what is going on in thought when one is "objecting" to an idea or "rejecting" possible choices in making a decision. We constantly speak in metaphors (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson show how pervasively we do this in Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, 1980). Because we use metaphors, we owe it to children to give them the keys so that they can infuse with an ancient generative energy their use of language today.
Julian Jaynes observes, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), that "the most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors .... The grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more and more complex . . . . Indeed, language is an organ of perception not merely a means of communication .... Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give and take of talk have worn away with use .... Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding."
In second grade we have been aware of an awakening to our own language as reflected in more confident reading, and joyous writing since we began to learn about the ancient origins of our vocabulary. Just as we need to teach children the alphabetic components - sounds of individual letters or combinations of them - so that they can systematically decipher the words on a printed page, so we need to teach vocabulary from the beginning as a system of component parts - roots and affixes - that have been handed down to us in a remarkable degree of preservation from the Latin and Greek of ancient times.
Nancy A. Mavrogenes, in "The Effect of Elementary Latin Instruction on Language Arts Performance," in a 1977 issue of the Elementary School Journal, says, "Perhaps if educators take another look at [various studies reporting] the efficacy of Latin, the elementary school curriculum can be strengthened in the critical areas of reading and language arts. Such an improvement in language abilities can help to preserve not only our language but also our civilization."
Put another way, Latin and Greek taught in elementary school may well be that sine qua non - that "without which not" - of democracy, as Thomas Jefferson envisioned it: functional literacy.
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