etym final last college exam EVER

vulgar vs standardized latin

Vulgar Latin was the colloquially spoken Latin that eventually became romance languages. After the invasion of the Germans, dialectical differences within the language grew and literacy declined. Reading and writing became reserves of a small elite group, mostly people within the church.

Alcuin’s reform

Alcuin’s reform involved standardizing both the spelling and pronunciation of Latin from classical. This involved a practical shift mostly for romance language scholars - they had to change the way they read out texts from their traditional vernacular pronunciation. Due to this change, there was also a need to come up with a new system for writing the spoken vernacular so that people could understand what was being said.

Proto-Indo-European (PIE)

PIE is the best semblance of a language that we could reconstruct from the modern and historical Indo-European languages by using linguistic reconstruction and the comparative method. The comparative method is a technique for studying the evolution of languages that involves looking at a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages that have a common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards to infer the properties of that ancestor. A proto language is a hypothesized ancestral language that a bunch of confirmed languages are believed to have evolved from. Daughter languages are those that are attested and successors of the proto language.

elongate

e//long//ate

ovary

ov//ary

importance

im//port//ance

adumbrate

ad//umbr//ate

dictionary

dict//ion//ary

rebellion

re//bell//ion

intimidate

in//timid//ate

scriptorium

script//orium

ambidextrous

ambi//dextr//ous

stultify

stult//ify