Going Back to Classics To Cultivate English

Iconoclast Uses Latin and Greek

Ted Nellen is an iconoclast when it comes to Latin and Greek. That's "iconoclast," from the Greek "eikon," a figure or image, and "klaein," to break. As Webster's New World Dictionary defines it, "one who attacks and seeks to destroy widely accepted ideas, beliefs, etc."

Any of Mr. Nellen's ninth grade students at Murray Bergtraum High School for Business Careers in lower Manhattan could have figured that out.

Mr. Nellen seeks to destroy widely held beliefs about Latin and Greek: that they are unimportant languages, one dead, the other minor; that they are irrelevant to today's students; that they are difficult to teach, and that they are tedious to learn.

But he is not a teacher of Latin and Greek. Mr Nellen is an English teacher. And he does not exactly teach Latin or Greek to his students, either; what he does is show them the Latin and Greek roots found in so many English words.

Keeping a Sense of Fun

To Mr. Nellen, learning these ancient roots to modern words is fun, like doing a crossword puzzle or playing a game. And he conveys this sense to his students, who are ordinary New Yorkers of varying academic aptitudes.

"It makes a puzzle, but a solvable one," Mr. Nellen said of his method, which teaches students 300 Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes by the end of a semester. "They learn not to be afraid of the big words because they can break them up into related parts. And even if they don't always get it right, they have fun figuring it out."

Mr. Nellen's system works like this: Each week for 15 weeks, the students are given a list of 20 "words." Actully they are word parts from Latin and Greek. He calls them VETY lists, an acronym he invented for Vocabulary Etymology.

The students write the words on an index card and are responsible for learning them by searching the dictionary for English words that begin or end with the word part. Then, on the same index card, they write some of the English words they have found with that word part. There is a quiz every week.

A word part on the list for Week 9, for example, is "lith." A student might find the word "lithograph" in the dictionary and discover that it comes from "lith," meaning "stone," and "graph," meaning "to write or to draw."

Or, remembering the word part "mono" from the first week, a week in which all the numerical roots are taught, the student might put it together with "lith" and get "monolith," from the Greek "mono," for one or single, and "lith," stone.

Reading the dictionary definitions for monolith, the student would find a range from the first meaning--"something made of a single large piece of stone"--to the third meaning, "something like a monolith in size, unity of structure or purpose, unyielding quality."

"In class, we can then talk about examples of monoliths, or talk about what makes something monolithic," Mr. Nellen said.

Sometimes students are stumped by the many definitions, or the varying meanings of certain prefixes or suffixes. But the exploration alone helps them learn about vocabulary, said the 42-year-old Mr. Nellen, who began teaching in 1974 in a private school where Latin was required. He has been at Murray Bergtraum since 1983.

"All of a sudden vocabulary isn't a frightening thing," he said of his method, adding that many people use word roots in teaching vocabulary. "One of the beauties is, they arn't just memorizing; they are learning how language works, and also how to look things up."

Another benefit is that his students learn to recognize different categories of words, he said.

"About 60 to 70 percent of English words have Latin or Greek roots," he said. "Some others have specific name derivations, such as mythological names, which means they have to learn something about mythology. Some words are onomatopoetic, and about 5 percent are what I call weird words."

The common Latin roots in Spanish and French are intriguing to the Hispanic or Carribbean students who know these languages, he said. "They can see the commonality, except in the Asian languages, but this really helps the Asian learn English. I think they profit the most from it."

Using Latin and Greek to Learn English

These are the Latin and Greek suffixes and prefixes assembled by Ted Nellen, a high school teacher, to help students understand English vocabulary. The students learn 20 words each week, starting with a group of numbers and mathematics-related words. The other lists are alphabetical. The words grouped together by slashes have similar meaning and are counted as one entry.

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