why the ass did they teach us about greek and latin roots in school and not about the even cooler and more badass proto-indo-european roots
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the gift that keeps on giving
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might do a PIE root thread. i’ve been looking up a ton of stuff on etymonline but haven’t been able to figure out the most amusing way to structure it into threads
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okay maybe this is why they didn't teach us PIE stuff in school: apparently there's wide disagreement about a lot of it and the whole field is very speculative. sucks. shoulda taught us anyway
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Replying to @meekaale
this page? i had not! this is helpful, i didn’t know this site was mostly (?) being maintained by one guy, that’s wild. he has a helpful disclaimer about PIE too
etymonline.com/columns/post/a
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generally speaking it would've been rad to hear more in school about all the stuff we *don't know*
"hey boys and girls, did you know that literally nobody knows where the words 'boy' or 'girl' came from"
how cool would that have been to hear
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Replying to
serious answer: probably b/c in parsing new words, 1) referencing siblings (not ancestors) in the IE tree helps bridge the gap between familiar/everyday Germanic and unfamiliar/literary Latin/Greek parts of our lexicon; 2) PIE roots aren't reliably recognizable in modern English
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Because the Greek and Latin roots are attested, while the PIE ones are reconstructed/speculative
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Can't speak PIE. Need to speak a language at/with kids to get them learning it.