Making sense of spelling - Gina Cooke
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/making-sense-of-spelling-gina-cooke What can spelling tell us about relationships between words? While spelling ...
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You've probably seen an email or an internet post about how weird and random English spelling seems to be. But what if I told you that it actually makes perfect sense? In fact, that's spelling's job: Making sense. Think of spelling a word as peeling back the layers of an onion. The first layer is a word's sense and meaning. Often there are multiple layers of meaning. Another layer is the word's structure. Think of the center of the onion as a word's base element, its essential kernel of meaning. A free-base element, like O-N-E, or T-W-O, can stand on its own as a word, like one, or two. A bound base, like the R-U-P-T of "erupt" or "rupture" needs another element in order to surface in a word. Two or more bases give us compounds, like &quo...
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You've probably seen an email or an internet post about how weird and random English spelling seems to be. But what if I told you that it actually makes perfect sense? In fact, that's spelling's job: Making sense. Think of spelling a word as peeling back the layers of an onion. The first layer is a word's sense and meaning. Often there are multiple layers of meaning. Another layer is the word's structure. Think of the center of the onion as a word's base element, its essential kernel of meaning. A free-base element, like O-N-E, or T-W-O, can stand on its own as a word, like one, or two. A bound base, like the R-U-P-T of "erupt" or "rupture" needs another element in order to surface in a word. Two or more bases give us compounds, like &quo...
