By Richard Krill

Description

Shaping the content of a college-level vocabulary-building course is never easy. This is especially the case when the students enrolled are likely to be pursuing a great range of academic majors from medicine to law, from literature to geology, from psychology to mathematics.

Greek and Latin in English Today is a vocabulary-builder par excellence, with the added advantage that it builds understanding of the critical roles Greek and Latin played in the development of English. The book’s incremental approach and reinforcing exercises bring vocabulary building into everyone’s reach.

The book also includes lucid explanations of the metric system, Roman numerals, and other classification systems; and exercises aimed at reinforcing each chapter's lesson. A section deals with Greek and Latin in the development of specialized nomenclature in science, medicine, law, and the arts.

Special Features

• 32 brief chapters on the Latin and Greek derivatives of both common and technical/professional contemporary vocabulary
• Charts including geologic time, Indo-European family of languages, subatomic particles, and early alphabets
• Over a dozen anatomical diagrams, map showing the spread of language in Europe, map of the moon, plus other images from antiquity
• Lists of animal names, educational degrees, cognates, vocabulary, and more
• Hundreds of exercises

Extras

Comments and Reviews

There is no doubt that the scientific vocabulary in English and other languages has increased enormously with every advance of modern science and technology, and this is in addition to the technical vocabulary for non-scientific discourse and disciplines.

Richard Krill's Greek and Latin in English Today is clear evidence that help is available for those who would like to find a way to master this very necessary vocabulary which is in great part derived from Greek and Latin. Dr. Richard Krill, who is Professor of Classics and Humanities and Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Toledo, has put together a valuable handbook to introduce students and others "to a concentrated study of important Greek and Latin roots commonly found in English vocabulary and to set forth for their benefit the basic principles upon which new words are coined annually even to this day from these ancient languages. The primary purpose of this text is to assist in these efforts" (preface). This book is not a classical languages textbook but it is a book that will familiarize the students with some very necessary Greek and Latin that will enable them to master technical vocabulary in a variety of fields more easily, including literature and the arts, medicine, law, philosophy, theology, botany, zoology, astronomy, pharmacy, chemistry, psychology, sociology, government, and education.

Real Greek and Latin are presented in their complete, natural and original form. More detailed vocabularies of selected fields are included in a special section. There is a wide variety of exercises for the student to practice with at the end of each chapter, and it is obvious that the user of this book will also need a hefty and reliable English dictionary with etymologies.

The three principal parts of Krill's work embrace (1) Derivatives from Greek (with a General Greek Vocabulary); (2) Derivatives from Latin (with a General Latin Vocabulary); (3) Derivatives/Phrases in Selected Fields (including mottoes, degree titles, educational terms, and time expressions). The book uses a graded, incremental approach to building English vocabulary, while at the same time encouraging the student to learn elements and structures derived from ancient Greek and Latin. Krill's book has already actually been successfully tested with hundreds of students in real classroom situations in a number of major universities and is now being made available to a much wider audience . . . .

Greek and Latin in English Today is a very serious attempt to offer a practical handbook for the use of Greek and Latin in English. Though some will be able to use the book without a competent teacher, most will need a classically trained instructor to get the most out of this book, which will surely replace all previous books on the subject for some time to come.

— John E. Rexine
Colgate University
Classical Bulletin 67.1 (1991)

Author Bio

Richard M. Krill received the degrees of AB and AM from John Carroll University and PhD from St. Louis University. He taught classics at LeMoyne College (Syracuse) and the University of Missouri-Columbia before becoming professor of Classics and the Humanities at The University of Toledo, at which institution he is currently professor emeritus.