As discussed in An Introduction to Etymology: Word Histories, the etymology of a word refers to its origin and historical development: that is, its earliest known use, its transmission from one language to another, and its changes in form and meaning. In this article, Neil Postman describes an engaging way of introducing students to etymology and the multicultural history of the English language.
In his book The End of Education (1995), the late social critic Neil Postman argued that young students would benefit from studying the history of the English language. Especially worth recalling is this basic lesson in etymology that he devised for children in the seventh grade:
I cannot say at what age students ought to begin the study of the history of English in ways that stress its multicultural dimensions. I know it can be done in the seventh grade, since I have done it.
Keeping an old teacher's tendency toward nostalgia under tight control, I can remember, nonetheless, the enthusiasm and even wonder of seventh graders discovering, first, the origins of their own names and then the various sources of the names of common foods. The latter assignment asked the students to imagine that four of them went to a local diner for lunch and gave the following orders: The first wanted soup, a cheeseburger with squash, and coleslaw on the side, then some tea with cherry pie. The second wanted a waffle, a banana split (this was years ago, when everyone knew what a banana split was), and coffee. The third wanted chili with plenty of pepper, and a cookie. The fourth ordered a turkey sandwich with gravy and soy sauce, and a Coke. The task was to discover the languages from which each of these food names originated. Soup derives from French; cheese comes from Latin; burger from German; squash. American Indian; cole slaw, Dutch; tea, Chinese; cherry, German; pie, Irish; waffle, Dutch; banana, African; coffee, Arabic; chili, Spanish; pepper, Indian; cookie, Dutch; turkey, Arabic; gravy, French; soy, Japanese; Coke, American. (I didn't include pizza because I thought it was too obvious.)
The imagined lunches may not have been nutritious for the body, but were for the mind. The assignment led us into a reasonably sophisticated study of the growth of English and its debt to languages all over the globe. The study may be called "etymology," or "historical linguistics," or, simply, "origins." Perhaps "origins" in elementary school because it is less frightening; "etymology" in high school; "historical linguistics" in college. The name is not important; the inquiry is.
It is possible that the subject can be introduced even earlier than the seventh grade, since most children are interested in where words come from. Is is also well to keep in mind Jerome Bruner's famous dictum (from his The Process of Education) that any subject can be taught in an intellectually respectable way to children of almost any age.
(Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
We could quibble over a few of Postman's food-name etymologies. For instance, both cherry and pie, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, are rooted in Latin words that showed up in English by way of Old French. And though several varieties of pepper are cultivated in India, the name of the spice entered Old English via Latin and Greek.
But quibbles aside, the exercise is a good one, and the key point raised by Postman is even better. From an early age, most children are fascinated by language. And studying word histories--in various ways at different stages of a child's development--is an engaging way of exploring the notion that English is an inherently multicultural language.
By the way, the polite term for the importation of foreign words into English is borrowing--and we've borrowed from over 300 different languages. As James Nicoll has famously observed, "We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
Put another way, it seems unlikely that we'll be returning those "borrowed" words any time soon.
