Tuesday Recap

Guest post by our classmate Angel Quesada - Thanks Angel - Liam.

Hello guys,

This Tuesday we started the class talking about words that English has adopted or modified from another language, which was really interesting to know about.

While many words enter English as slang, not all do. Some words are adopted from other languages; some are mixtures of existing words, and some are new made of roots from dead languages.

For Example:

• Husband: The term husband refers to Middle English huseband, from Old English hūsbōnda, from Old Norse hūsbōndi (hūs, "house" + bōndi, būandi, present participle of būa, "to dwell", so, etymologically, "a householder").
  

• Alarm: From Old French alarme (14c.), from Italian all'arme "to arms!" (Literally "to the arms"). An interjection that came to be used as the word for the call or warning.

• Jean: From Middle French jean fustian "fustian (a type of twilled cotton cloth) of Genoa," the city in Italy, from Old French Jannes "Genoa," from Latin Genua.

• Genuine: From Latin genu "knee," from a supposed ancient custom of a father acknowledging paternity of a newborn by placing it on his knee.

• Orange: From Old French orange, orenge, from Medieval Latin pomum de orenge, from Italian arancia, originally narancia (Venetian naranza), alteration of Arabic naranj, from Persian narang, from Sanskrit naranga-s.

• Tennis: Most likely from Anglo-French tenetz "hold! receive! take!," from Old French tenez, imperative of tenir "to hold, receive, take" (see tenet), which was used as a call from the server to his opponent. 

In addition, we talked about Compound words with Prefixes and through the union of two words. Also English words that have certain patterns of stress which you should observe strictly if you want to be understood. 

Here are some examples for compound words (Blend):

• camcorder (camera + recorder)
• chexting (cheating + texting)
• clash (clap + crash)
• cosmeceutical (cosmetic + pharmaceutical)
• docudrama (documentary + drama)
• electrocute (electricity + execute)
• emoticon (emote + icon)

By the way, the definition for blend is:

A word formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two or more other words or word parts.

The best way to learn English stress is to listen to audio materials and to repeat them after the speaker. Generally, common English nouns, adjectives, and adverbs are more often stressed on the first syllable than on any other syllable. Verbs with prefixes are usually stressed on the second syllable. English words can't have two unstressed syllables at the beginning of the word; one of these syllables will be stressed. 

If a word has four or more syllables, there are usually two stresses in it: primary stress (strong stress) and secondary stress (weak stress). Also, secondary stress may be present (in addition to primary stress) in shorter words in the syllable in which the vowel remains long and strong.

To finish the class, Liam surprised us with a game where we had to write a verb, a thing and a well-known person, we formed 4 groups and then we tried to guess what was written on each piece of paper. It was really funny because some of the words were really rare. It was a good game to practice our English listening and speaking. 

Finally I recommend this website in order to practice your English, it's a really good one.

http://www.ego4u.com/