Learn English Spelling Rules
  • Home
  • The Books
    • Teach English >
      • Buy the Book
    • The Guide >
      • Reviews
      • Buy the Book
  • The Author
    • Other books by the author
  • English Tips Blog
  • Test Yourself!
  • Press
    • Media Kit & Photos

Double Plurals

12/27/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
English plurals can sometimes be very strange, especially if the root word has been borrowed from another language. Take the Italian word maestro. In its native land, the plural is maestri, but in English it is maestros. Similarly, that tasty pasta we call spaghetti is actually the plural of spago, the Italian word for a piece of string.

Then, of course, we have a few words that have no plural. Sheep are sheep. You can’t call them sheeps or sheepses. Which reminds me…real fishermen never call what they catch fishes. Fish are fish, never fishes.

Just to make things interesting, we also have about a dozen words that are quite irregular. We can talk about houses and spouses, but we can’t say that mouses have louses. It’s mice have lice. And it’s definitely not “hice” and “spice.”

But how about plural plurals? One has amused my editor for a while—opus. This word comes from the Latin and means “work.” The word “work” comes from the old Germanic weorc and can be pluralized. For example, “Shakespeare’s works.”

But the plural of opus is opera (“works”) and—in English—the plural of opera is operas. So we do have a plural plural.

Fortunately, time and usage have separated opus and opera. An opera is now a  singular word. “Beethoven wrote only one opera, while Scarlatti wrote more than fifty operas.”

The word opus does have a plural form: opuses. But this is gradually giving way to “works” (“the works of  Haydn”) and the plural word opuses is very rarely, if ever, used.


0 Comments

The Flying Dutchman

12/20/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
Dutch is a difficult language for foreigners to learn, so the Dutch solve the problem by learning English, French, German, and any other language they consider useful. They must be the most multilingual people in Europe. They have given the English language a great number of words, ranging from cookie and Yankee to Howitzer and Knapsack.

The name Dutch is not quite correct. It’s based on Deutsche, which means “people” in German. The Dutch live in Holland, but that is the name of only one region of the country. Officially, the country is called The Netherlands, which means “low lands,” and the language is Dutch, which in Belgium they call Flemish. Now you know why most Dutchmen—oops! Nederlanders speak English so well.

The Dutch have been excellent sailors for a thousand years or more. If you own any kind of boat, you will inevitably be using Dutch words. Are you the skipper of a smack, a sloop, a ketch, or a scow? Maybe you’re the commodore of a cruiser or a yacht? You walk the deck up to the bow to check the jib and bang your head on the boom. You peer over the bulwark at the dock before you hoist sail. You yell “Avast there, you lubbers!” at your crew and watch for the buoy that marks the shoal that has not been dredged. As a precaution, you test the pump. You don’t want a leak if you meet an iceberg. That freight you have onboard doesn’t mean you are a smuggler. Best of luck, and put a shot of brandy or gin in your coffee.

The “Flying Dutchman” is the name of a phantom ship that sails round and round the globe, never to dock. There have been historical sightings of the ship over the past two or three centuries, but skeptics say these were optical illusions. In 1843, German composer Richard Wagner wrote an opera in which the ship’s captain, who once invoked Satan, is doomed to sail forever until he is redeemed by the love of a woman.

A little known historical fact: In 1688, Prince William of Orange (a royal family in the Netherlands) led a fleet of more than fifty warships and hundreds of transports loaded with 40,000 men and 4,000 horses that landed in Kent, England, where he had been invited to take the English throne because he was married to the daughter of James II, who had been overthrown. William was crowned William III, and James II (last of the house of Stewart and a Scotsman) was sent packing. William’s fleet was the biggest ever to be seen in the English Channel until the Normandy Invasion during World War 2. It was also the last successful “invasion” of Britain, which neither Napoleon nor Hitler was able to do.


0 Comments

Learning How to Spell

12/13/2017

4 Comments

 
Picture
Every experienced teacher knows more than one way to teach most subjects, but spelling is different. However we approach spelling, we still end up having to memorize the correct spelling of every word.

In the days before television and computers, people actually read books and wrote letters on paper with pens and typewriters. They regularly read and wrote words, and this constant repetition helped them to remember how to spell the words correctly.

But in those ancient days, they still memorized lists of words. And they did it the way I did, and my father did, and you most probably did. They received twenty words on Monday and had a spelling test on Friday. During the week, the teacher helped the class study the words, but the onus fell to the student to memorize them for the Friday test.

I don't see anything wrong with this system. I used it myself when I taught school. Parents expect this method which gives students a performance record to show their parents. The main problem is choosing appropriate words for the students. Depending on their ages and abilities, I always preferred to use words that illustrated a spelling rule.

Taking words from lists like “The 50 Most Difficult Words” or “The 100 Hardest Words to Spell” is, of course, a silly waste of time. It promotes short-term memory only. The ideal would be for students to read more books or magazines or even comics. In the meantime, we have to fall back on old-fashioned memorization. It worked for our parents. Why shouldn’t it work for us, too?



4 Comments

The Silent E

12/6/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
The silent E is both very common and extremely useful in English spelling. Just placing a silent E at the end of word creates a whole new word with a different sound. The only problem is to know when to retain and when to drop the silent E when adding a suffix to the word. I cover this problem in two of my books: The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules and also in the upcoming How to Teach English Spelling.

Some critics say the silent E is overused. They say it should be eliminated from such words as blue and true. This idea irritates me because it's obvious that those critics are not familiar with the spelling rule that applies to words that end in U.  

The rule is quite simple:

With the exception of you and thou, no commonly used English word ends in U. Any word that does end in U is an exotic import or a borrowed word: menu, guru, and jujitsu.

The same rule also applies to V. There just aren’t any commonly used English words that end in V. Give, live, love, have, glove, and serve all have to have the silent E after the V.

A small group of short words, fewer than a dozen, end in O followed by the silent E: toe, hoe, and foe.

Some say that the silent E rule is illogical. That may be true, but the silent E does have the benefit of uniformity, and young children and foreign students learning English accept it quickly and find it to be no big problem.


0 Comments
    Picture
    CLICK TO VIEW...
    Picture
    Weekly English Tips Blogs parallel his book The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules. Plus interesting background about how English evolved.

    Buy the Book

    JOHN FULFORD

    Author, English Professor and world traveler.

    Archives

    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Picture
All media and other persons interested in reaching
John Fulford, please contact:
Kathleen Kaiser, Kathleen@KKANews.com • 805.607.6717

View John's chapter by chapter lessons on...
Picture