Old English
The Germanic core — home, hearth, body, weather.
Spot it: kn-, gh, th, wh, -ful, -ward, short concrete words
The roots of English — a field guide
English is a mongrel language, built in layers over fifteen centuries: a Germanic core, a Norse overlay, a French ruling class, and endless borrowings from Latin, Greek, and beyond. Learn to see the layers and you can read a word's history straight off its spelling. This is the same guide the games lean on — here it is in one place.
Four waves that made English
English began as the Germanic speech of the Angles and Saxons — the plain, everyday Old English core we still lean on for our most basic words (house, bread, love, eat). Then came the Vikings, whose Old Norse left blunt, useful words behind — sky, skin, egg, knife — and, remarkably, even the pronoun they.
In 1066 the Norman conquest installed a French-speaking ruling class, and for three centuries French vocabulary settled over the top of the language like a second storey. It is why we tend the Old English cow, pig, and sheep in the field but eat the French beef, pork, and mutton at the table — the farmers were English, the diners Norman. Finally, centuries of scholarship poured in Latin and Greek for science, law, and ideas, while trade routes carried in Arabic words for mathematics, stars, and goods. English never swapped one layer for the next; it kept them all — which is why it so often has three words for nearly one thing (kingly, royal, regal) and a vocabulary larger than any of its neighbours.
The six strata of English
Almost every English word belongs to one of six families. Each has a home region, a characteristic feel, and telltale spellings.
Old Norse
What the Vikings left behind — blunt, everyday words.
Spot it: sk-, eggy/uggy sounds, law & ship words, even 'they'
Latin
Empire, church, and scholarship — twice-borrowed, often.
Spot it: -tion, -ity, -ous, aqua-, -pede, polished abstract words
Old French
The Norman conquest, 1066 — law, cuisine, refinement.
Spot it: ch- said as 'sh', -et, -age, beauty & banquet words
Greek
The language of science and ideas, coined and re-coined.
Spot it: ph, rh, y inside a word, -logy, -graph, tele-, micro-
Arabic
Borrowed along the trade routes — math, goods, comfort.
Spot it: al- at the front, market goods, star & number words
Grimm's law — why cousins don't look alike
Latin and the Germanic languages both descend from Proto-Indo-European, but Germanic drifted away by a regular set of sound shifts, catalogued by Jacob Grimm. Where Latin (and the French and Latin words English later borrowed) kept an old consonant, English's inherited core shifted it. Once you know the pattern, the cousins line up:
| Shift | Same word, two routes |
|---|---|
| p → f | Latin pēs, English foot |
| t → th | Latin trēs, English three |
| k → h | Latin cor, English heart |
| d → t | Latin dēns, English tooth |
| gʷ → kw | Latin vīvus, English quick |
This is why father and paternal, or heart and cardiac, are the same ancient word arriving by two different roads. Branch is built entirely on these split lineages.
Prefixes shape-shift
A prefix often changes its last letter to match the sound that follows — but it stays the same prefix. Learn the family and a whole layer of English stops looking irregular:
- in- "in / not" → im- (import), il- (illegal), ir- (irregular)
- con- "together" → com- (compress), col- (collate), cor- (correct)
- ad- "to" → ac-, af-, ap-, at- (accept, affect, append, attract)
- ex- "out" → ef- (effect), e- (emit)
- sub- "under" → sup- (support), sus- (suspect)
Roots wear masks
One root can surface in several spellings — and this is where the surprising links between words hide. A handful worth knowing:
- break (Latin frangere): fracture · fragment · infringe
- carry (Latin ferre): transfer · relate · translate
- take (Latin capere): capture · accept · receive
- lead (Latin ducere): conduct · reduce · introduce
- send (Latin mittere): admit · mission · transmit
Peel off the prefix, look at the core, and trust that meanings drift: a fraction is a broken-off piece, a fragment a broken bit, to infringe is to break a rule — all "break." That disguised-root spotting is exactly what Graft trains.
How to coin a word
Greek and Latin combining-forms are the LEGO of English: tele- (far), necro- (death), -logy (study of), -phile (lover), -mancy (divination). Snap two together and you have a word — most of which nobody has ever coined.
There is one rule of assembly, the classical-compound rule: keep the connecting -o- before a consonant (necro + phobia → necrophobia), but drop it before a vowel (necro + archy → necrarchy, never necroarchy). Build words this way in Mint.