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Grammar girl here, I'm Mignon Fuggedy, and this week I have a super-medie middle by

Neil Whitman about the origin of English and other languages and how they're all tied

together.

If you ever studied Latin or Greek word roots in your middle school or high school English

classes, you may have wondered why English words are so different from Latin or Greek

roots.

For example, the Latin root for the word tooth is dent, as indentest.

The Greek root is odont, as in orthodontist.

But the English word, of course, is tooth.

Here's another one.

The Latin root for foot is ped, as in pedestrian or pedestal.

The Greek root is pod or pod, as in podiatrist.

But instead of a word containing P and D, English just has foot.

On the other hand, sometimes an English word is a lot like the equivalent root in Latin

or Greek.

For example, the Latin word for mother is mater, and Greek is mater.

And they both resemble the English word, starting with M, with a T in the middle, and an R

at the end.

What's going on with this mix of similarities and differences?

The answer is that Latin, Greek, and English are all related.

But Latin and Greek are more closely related to each other than they are to English.

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