How Soon Should We Teach Etymology and Morphology? Day One.

By Patrick Mongeau

I have been preparing the script to my first video and have gone down the rabbit hole concerning the word <one>. This word shows up right away in school, even prior to teaching kids how to read, write, and spell, as they learn to count. As soon as we ask them to start writing, we are going to be talking about how many things there are, and it is a needed word.

It’s definitly a Worst Word, too, because, as it is written, it looks like it should say, “own.” In fact, at one time, it did. According to a great book I read recently, Bill Bryson’s “The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way,” it had a <u> until Norman Scribes changed it to an <o>, as they did with enough words that there is a term for it: the Scribal O. Prior to that, the word was pronounced “oon,” and had been sounded out as “une.” (Reminds me of one of my favorite card games, named for “one” in Spanish, Uno, and of course the prefix uni-, as in unicycle.)

Later, this guy named William Caxton brought a printing press from Belgium to London and started printing books. It was at this time, in the late 1400s, that English spelling got standardized. The place he set up shop was London, and in London at that time, people said “oon” or “own” when counting (depending who you ask), which matched the spelling of the word pretty well. This word entered into some compounds, especially with the word “all.”

all + one = alone = lone

all + one + like = lonely

one + like = only

However, outside of these few words, the pronunciation died out. Instead, the way they said <one> in Kent, to the Southwest, spread through the language and became the standard way to say the name of the digit. However, because the spelling had been fossilized in early printed books, and that spelling had spread into other words related by morphology, or meaning, the word retained the spelling it had in London around the year 1500.

So, that’s the short version of why the sound, or phonology, of the word and its spelling seem so incongruous. Instead of changing its spelling as people changed the way it sounded, the spelling froze (like it almost always does). To understand why, you need to know this story about the past. The history, or etymology, of the word makes the spelling make more sense, and helps you see the meaning of not just “one” but also related words like “lonely.”

Sound is not the only, or even the major, driver of spelling in our language, and it never has been. Instead, as Kelli Sandman-Hurley says in her incredible book “Dyslexia and Spelling: Making Sense of It All,” it’s at “the intersection of morphology, etymology, and phonology…that we can truly understand English spellings.”

When we use those big words, it sounds like too much information for little kids to handle. But a simpler way to say the same thing to kids is this. "“You can’t only sound out English words, because letters have three jobs. They make sound, show meaning, and save history.” This is why reading programs based fully on phonics will always produce a percentage of students, some of whom are expert language users, who couldn’t spell if their lives depended upon it. They don’t know the way English spelling works, and their teachers only gave them one tool, sound, when they needed three: sound, meaning, and history.

So, if we need to present these three concepts to children, we need to decide when and how to introduce them to the ideas. But how quickly? Is Kindergarten too young for such complex concepts? My answer to that question is that we should explain how spelling really works as soon as a word comes into everyday use that seems to “break” a phonics rule we have taught. (I don’t think there are any true phonics rules in English, of course, because phonics doesn’t drive spelling. WIthout rules, there are not exceptions, either, just more or less common patterns.)

That brings me to a sister of the word <one>. The ancient ancestor of <one> is <an>, which turned into both a numeric word and an abbreviated form, <a>.

When a Kindergartener walks into school, we immediately tell them “A says ah.” Later, we let them know that “A also says AY.” And yet, one of the most common words in English, bound to be a part of almost every sentence a child ever reads, is <a>, which is pronounced as AY sometimes, but most often with a weird little vowel sound that’s somewhere between a schwa, which is introduced way later, and a broad a (ah) sound, which is typically not introduced at all, even to teachers! (As a Boston area native, I find this pahticulahly frustrating.) Not only that, the child will see the letter A act this way in about, America, Ava, and tons of other words and names they see all the time. So, are we doing them a favor by telling them to just sound out words, or would it help them to know that it is spelled with the letter A because it shares a history and meaning with its word mom, <an>?

Not only does that piece of information help students spell a word they all need to write every day, it also sets them up for success in reading and writing skills for the rest of their lives.

The Science of Reading is great, because direct instruction on phonics is incredibly importnat. However, it falls short, too, because it’s too detached from meaning. This is why we keep having the Reading Wars. There is an argument over whether we should focus on sound or meaning in the younger grades. With the Worst Words approach, you can do both, using the same polynymous words (high frequency, sight, heart, Dolch and Fry , etc.) you have to spend time on anyway.

The more clear and direct we can be about how words in English are formed using sound, meaning, and history, the more masterful our students will become in every literacy skill. The longer we wait, the more we risk cognitive dissonance both right away, when we tell them sound makes spelling and that doesn’t really work, and later, when we say spelling makes meaning and it’s too late to ask them to shift their spelling strategy. Along the way, we miss so many brain-tickling moments like when you show them that the word “alone” includes the word, “one.” How cool is that?

Make the Worst Words work for you!