Discovering the date of the attestation of this word in English, we wondered: what event or forces propelled this word into the English lexicon at that particular time? Buried in the word refugee lurk suggestions of persecution and massacre. Refugee is derived from the Latin infinitive ‘fugere’ and the past participle ‘ fugitivus’, denoting fleeing, taking flight. They discovered that it arrived in English in the 1680s. The students below researched ‘ refugee’ tracking its route from 5,500 years ago into present day English. Below samples from the research of ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’, both words students had considered when reading the The Arrival. Each group or pair of students chose a word to investigate further. Their hypotheses and questions provoke the impetus for the next stage of the investigation. The discussion around connotations, hypotheses as to the elements, matching word to denotation, and matching word to root, raises questions to pursue in research and prepares the students for a thoughtful interrogation of the resources – The Online Etymology Dictionary, John Ayto’s Word Origins and the OED. I overheard statements such as, “Isn’t ‘Latin?” “Why the asterisk?” “Why is there a hyphen after some roots? ” “There’s a , does that mean it’s Greek?” Examining the root, can help students to identify the base element and graphemes that surface in present day English. Next I gave each group the roots only – no root denotation, no indication of the language of origin. Students matched the denotations I had printed from the dictionary, carefully reading these arguing, questioning, and discussing words. Listen to the excited group discussions, then whole class discussion. I did not specifically ask students to discuss the meaning, but the thinking necessary to rank, demands clarity about each word. Two identical words cease to coexist in English, one will shift and change to take on slightly different connotations, such as occurred with Old English derived ‘heaven’ and the arrival into English of Norse ‘sky’. They fall along degrees of proximity to a particular word. Similarities in meaning exist but each is not a replica of the other. Any time words are compared involves discussing what it is and what it is not. These words became the basis of our word study.Īs we discussed the various words for people who move or shift places, I asked the class to rank them on a continuum from positive to negative. We wondered how the names we attach and labels we give for the arrivals effect our outlook and their fates. We discussed the way a settled group perceive newcomers, the arrivals. This was a surprise to students as there were no words – at least no English words, any text within the book being written in the language of the Nameless Land. We spent a week reading and discussing this rich narrative. Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is one text students continue to pour over. We read these texts and images conversing about motif, theme, character development, and note the balance between word and image, the dance of the visual in harmony with the word. Most often our orthographic investigations arise from a picture book which helps frame our discussion, serves as an introductory exploration of themes, and is a text that we can return to, only to discover with each return that it is not a going back or a repetition of the initial experience, but that with each rereading we discover and understand more. Of course, the investigations do all this, but the primary aim of any investigation is to deepen understandings of the concepts, texts and issues at the heart of our year long conversations in humanities. Word investigations are rarely carried out in our humanities classes just for the sake of developing skills to investigate a word, or to teach spelling or to expand a student’s vocabulary. Rivers feature in this word investigation and this map echoes the flux occurring in words, the twists and turns of meaning as the past, like the meanders above, impacts the present. This 1944 map shows the flux of the Mississippi River for the past 1000 years, each colour showing an old channel.The history of its change was recorded in the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, published by the Army Corp of Engineers in 1944.
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