Learning Spanish Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics: Introduction

Introduction

This small book aims to help teenage students and adults to learn Spanish vocabulary. Unlike most books published so far, this book combines a moderate amount of etymology and made-up mnemonics, with a practical balance between scholarly research and light reading. It is both a pocket-size dictionary used as a reference, and supplemental study material used for leisure reading.

It's a well-known fact that cognates help foreign language learners study vocabulary, and a slightly less known fact that etymology or origin of words helps. Unfortunately, as of today, there is rarely any book on the market that explicitly utilizes etymological information to help learners memorize words. On the one hand, etymological dictionaries written by scholars focus on the task proper, i.e., providing etymology, usually not giving consideration to its practical value in helping people to learn vocabulary. On the other hand, there're books written to make use of man-made mnemonics, with no regard to etymology; Dr. Michael Gruneberg's Spanish by Association, doing an excellent job as intended, is such an example.

With these two approaches, etymology and mnemonics, we see a long-stretched but maybe narrow gap that can be bridged by the effort of a person willing to think and write. It is "long-stretched" because thousands or tens of thousands of words can be dealt with in this manner, and "narrow" because many words that don't "ring a bell" to an English speaker only need an easy hint or reminder for the learner to connect their meanings to their origins, and this hint usually has to be expressly brought up by another person trained in thinking of linking either etymology or mnemonics to the current spelling.

Take Spanish word hondo ("deep"; "bottom") as an example. The learner just needs to remember a rule that generally applies to a large group of words h <- f (i.e., f changed to h in history). So he changes hondo back to fondo, which sounds and looks like the first part of fundamental, which connects to "deep" and "bottom" in meaning. Derrotar ("to defeat") does not appear to be related to any English word on first look. But etymology reveals that it ultimately shares the same Latin source with English word rout (as in "The enemy is routed."), which the -rot- part of derrotar, after stripping prefix de- and suffix -ar, sounds like. Thus a connection is made. (The Latin word rumpere is not needed for this connection although it would help if the learner had knowledge of it.)

Unfortunately, not all words can make use of etymology to aid memory. For instance, for historical reasons, a significant number of Spanish words came from Arabic. It's very unlikely that the learner already knows Arabic; therefore a different tactic has to be used to fill the gap, using artificial mnemonics. For example, alfombra ("carpet") can use the mnemonic "Al found a bra on the carpet", which not only creates a scene with a "linkword" as Dr. Gruneberg called in his book (which does not make use of etymology at all), but also makes a phrase or sentence that sounds like the Spanish word to be remembered.

The current book will primarily rely on etymology, and only fall back on mnemonics when etymology is lacking or too obscure. While mnemonics stop serving any purpose and can be dispensed with after the learner fully remembers the word, etymology may be retained as knowledge, if the learner wishes, and in fact often does so, to go beyond just learning a foreign language. Thus, in a fun way this book offers the additional advantage in terms of expanding the learner's historical and cultural background.

Not for pure scholarly research, but for practical use, any "irrelevant" details in etymology not conducive to vocabulary study are skipped to avoid "pedantic" boredom in this book. On the other hand, in case the "internal" history of a word is not enough to explain the origin, its "external" history is researched and provided; for instance, the reason why chantaje ("blackmail", "extortion") is related to singing is that the bad guys would boo the singers if they were refused money before the show, a fact uncovered in a 19th century book. To further accommodate a non-scholarly reader, among all languages, only knowledge of English is assumed. Minimum Latin and practically no words in other languages will be given in description of each word.

The book is for people to study Spanish, specifically Spanish vocabulary. It is limited to adults and young adults only, since young children tend to complain that "I have to remember that hint", referring to the etymology or mnemonic as an extra burden instead of an aid. Adults will be able to utilize their life experience and general linguistic knowledge, even if it's implicit or dormant in their minds, in second language acquisition. Not only is the book useful to high school and college students, but it is also and perhaps more appealing to the people learning Spanish outside of a school environment, because vocabulary acquisition becomes a more prominent obstacle in learning a foreign language when not following a textbook, where new words are fixed and outlined in each lesson. Polyglots or people knowing or learning multiple languages, especially other Romance languages, will find this book particularly helpful. The more language experience, the better. Among other things, knowing an additional language may give you an advantage in spotting cognation not mentioned by this book due to the restriction that the reader is assumed to only know English. And in case of unhelpful etymology, there's also extra advantage in conjuring up a better mnemonic that sounds and means closer to a word in that additional language you know.

When mnemonics have to be created, there're tricks to help search for the best words. They are summarized in the Appendix.

References used by this book are as follows:

Guido Gómez de Silva, Breve Diccionario Etimológico de la Lengua Española, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006. A classic etymological dictionary of Spanish by the late Dr. de Silva.
Edward A. Roberts, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Spanish Language with Families of Words Based on Indo-European Roots, Vols. I and II, Xlibris, 2014. These two-volume books were heavily consulted during the reviewing and rewriting process. Dr. Roberts' expertise in providing guidance, additions and corrections cannot be appreciated enough.
Myetymology.com, "a universal etymology dictionary" with a nice semi-graphic representation of word evolution.
Etymonline.org, a professional quality English language etymology web site created by a non-professional, extracting from sources such as Oxford English Dictionary.
Wiktionary.org, which uses various etymological dictionaries. Fast and convenient reference.
Diccionario de la lengua española, http://lema.rae.es/drae/, Real Academia Española (RAE). The brief etymology provided by this online dictionary is terse and yet "official".
Auguste Brachet, Etymological Dictionary of the French Language, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1878. In spite of being a French dictionary, this is a must-have reference for anyone serious about etymology because the author's unique organization and analysis of the evolution of letters or letter combinations from earlier languages in a strictly scientific manner illuminate many a case that would otherwise remain obscured.
F.E.J. Valpy, An Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Language, 1828. Occasionally this dictionary provides insight into the true origin of obscure words.
Ralph Penny, A History of the Spanish Language, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2002. This is a thorough treatment of the "internal" history of the Spanish Language, with detailed description of various phonological and morphological changes.
Paul M. Lloyd, From Latin to Spanish: Historical Phonology and Morphology of the Spanish Language, American Philosophical Society, 1987.
Pedro Felipe Monlau, Diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 1856. Some hard-to-explain words may be found in this dictionary with a plausible alternative explanation.
Wikipedia, History of the Spanish language, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Spanish_language. An excellent short overview of the historical evolution of the Spanish language.
David Brodsky, Spanish Vocabulary: An Etymological Approach, University of Texas Press, 2008. An excellent book on this subject.
VOX Everyday Spanish and English Dictionary, McGraw-Hill, 2005. This and various other Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries are regularly checked for the most appropriate definitions, and for decisions on whether to include a word that may simply happen to be a high frequency proper name.

Notes

Words in this book are taken from, and ordered according to, Real Academia Española (Royal Academy of Spain) Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) - Listado de frecuencias (Current Spanish Reference Corpus - List of frequencies)

http://corpus.rae.es/frec/CREA_total.zip

Therefore, the words are ordered in descending frequency of usage. Very common words (approximately the first one to two hundred in the list), very "easy" words for an English-speaking person, and the words that are simply conjugated or inflected forms with no significant new meanings are omitted. This book takes the first 15000 out of the CREA, but with all omissions for the said reasons, about 3000 headwords are included.

Because the words are listed in frequency order, definitions and descriptions of the words on later pages may be slightly more academic or technical and may use words on earlier pages as definitions including doublets, i.e. Spanish words of the same origin. Skipping certain technical details are perfectly acceptable.
All words on the RAE corpus web page are lower-case, including some that should obviously be initially capitalized, e.g. roma (Roma), prd (most likely Partido de la Revolución Democrática). Proper nouns are generally omitted in this book. They're included if the spellings significantly differ from their English counterparts or otherwise pose a challenge to word study.
Headwords are in bold type, as well as in "See also". Words considered to be linguistic units instead of part of the sentence are in italic, e.g., "English word foot is a cognate." Words as definitions or meanings are enclosed in double quotation marks, except when they're definitions for the headwords. Definitions for headwords may occasionally include Spanish synonyms, which are in italic.
Part of speech or word class, enclosed in parentheses, is obvious, such as n. for noun, adj. for adjective, interj. for interjection. They are only labeled in cases of possible ambiguity.
If a mnemonic is provided as a sentence or a phrase, the underlined words (or sometimes part of them) provide a phonetic clue, e.g., the mnemonic for the headword huelga, "The area of the strike is well-guarded by the police."
Two or more headwords are in one entry (paragraph) if one is a conjugated or inflected form of the other. They are entered in a position according to the ranking position of the first of these words in the RAE corpus (see the next point).
Some words do not appear to be in their proper frequency position in the RAE corpus. It may be related to the way the list is constructed and the corpus it uses, or because the list splits one lexeme into multiple word entries (forms), e.g. noche (at position 205) and noches (at 1782). Some words' apparent wrong frequency position may be due to popular proper names, such as romero (position 2766 near informes), which must be due to the title of the popular movie Romero instead of the plant "rosemary". For these reasons, headwords in this book do not always follow the order in the RAE frequency list, and the words of the same lexeme are generally grouped in one entry, in a position of the most frequent form but not necessarily the lemma or canonical form of the lexeme. For instance, in the lexeme of llamado (position 827), llama (position 924), llamar (position 1790), etc., the lemma llamar is used as a headword in this book but listed in the position as if it was llamado, the form with the lowest frequency position (i.e. highest usage frequency). This allows the learners to acquire knowledge of this word in the correct stage of vocabulary study in sequential reading of this book. Note that not all forms of the same lexeme are grouped under one headword; those with significantly different meanings, with stem changes, or with a large frequency difference may still be listed separately.
The word "root" is only used to refer to the root of a word, synonymous with "stem" in most contexts, not to the source or origin of a word or etymon.

Some general etymological rules are briefly outlined below. To remember the word, reverse the etymological evolution.

pl-, -cl, -fl to ll-: Examples: lleno ("full"; think of plenary), lluvia ("rain"; think of pluvial), llamar ("to claim", "to call"), llama ("flame"). Occasionally they change to -ch-, e.g. ancho ("wide", from Latin amplus). But of course exceptions exist, such as llevar ("to carry", from Latin levare, cognate with levitate).
f- to h-: Examples: hondo ("bottom", think of fundamental, profound), hoja ("leaf"; think of foliate).
-li to -i- or -x- to -j-: It usually occurs when -j- is intervocalic (i.e. between vowels, a.k.a "medial" in old etymological literature), e.g. ejemplo ("example"), eje ("axis"), complejo ("complex"), ejército ("army"; think of (military) exercise), hoja ("leaf"; think of foliate).
-ti- to -z-: Examples: alza ("rise"); caza ("hunting"). Their Latin sources contain -ti-, or -pti-, where pt is reduced to t.
b to and from v (merger of /b/ and /v/): Since the two consonants are pronounced the same in many parts of the Spanish speaking regions, confusion and conversion between them is understandable.

Some words have many meanings. But only the basic one or two are listed. After all, this is not a dictionary primarily for meanings, but instead for etymology as well as mnemonics to facilitate self-study of vocabulary. Which meaning or meanings are basic or are the reason for inclusion of this word into the RAE word frequency list in that ranking position is not always easy to determine. For example, the word goya, ranked 5706, has a meaning of "bitter melon", according to Wiktionary.org. But a Google search reveals that the name of Francisco Goya, an 18th-19th century Spanish painter, occurs much more than the name of the fruit. Inclusion of this word in my dictionary would be unwise. Unfortunately, not all words are so obvious, and a best effort guess will have to be made.

Cognates are two (or more) words, each in its own language, that are derived from another common word in a different language. This book generally traces word origin up to Latin, occasionally beyond Latin or to other languages. If a common word is found only in a remote ancient language such as Proto-Indo-European, cognation is not acknowledged merely for practical purposes, and sometimes is briefly mentioned if it helps with word study. Cognates are not doublets, which are two words, both in the same language, that are derived from another common word in a different language.

The book assumes no strict format for each entry. Free text format is the best option to provide appropriate amount of usage notes and warnings, such as "Not to be confused", "false friend", "Note the first meaning, which may not be easy to guess", to list a few. Unlike other sources that utilize etymology to assist in vocabulary study, this book makes a great effort to not miss any apparent disconnection between etymology and modern meaning of the word, and failing that, explicitly acknowledges it, usually followed by a best-effort mnemonic, as in "The meaning of ... may be due to ...", "It's not clear how the sense .... Use a mnemonic such as ...". Even a seemingly casual mention of an interesting fact (as in "It's interesting that ...") is meant to strengthen the learner's memory.

Everything done in this book is an attempt to achieve one goal only: help you remember the words. This is particularly helpful in initial encounter with a new word, when you use this book to gain advantage in the form of a clue or hint in order to avoid a completely blank mind when seeing the word again not long after you learn it. But in the end, the reader is still required to study the words. Etymology or mnemonics may indeed become a burden instead of an aid without genuine hard work.

For book errata and supporting materials, please visit http://yong321.freeshell.org/lsw/.