In any other language

    When I lived in Webster City, I was asked to give a presentation to a few classes of junior high students on their Character Counts Day. The day featured speakers who were either from other countries or had spent some long time in one. I was invited to speak because I had spent six months in Mexico during my senior year of college. I studied at a university for international students in a city just south of Mexico City called Cuernavaca.

    I had great fun showing the students photographs of the places I visited and the people I met. I told them a few interesting facts about Mexico, such as the fact that Mexico consumes more Coca-Cola than the United States, even though the United States has three times as many people. I also told them about how many Mexicans defend their homes by sticking broken glass bottles to the top of the walls that surround their house.

    Much of my presentation was spent telling the kids about learning Spanish. I told them they were already familiar with a few Spanish words from Mexican cuisine such as ?taco,? ?burrito? and ?enchilada.?

    I tried to impress upon them the value of learning a second language by showing how knowledge from one language, such as their native English, could be applied to correctly guess the meanings of words in other languages.

    I pointed out to the students that Spanish and English shared many root words because they both use words derived from Latin. Sometimes the similarities between the two are obvious. For instance, the word ?international? in English is spelled ?internacional? in Spanish; the word ?university? is ?universidad?; the word ?television? is ?televisión,? etc.

    You could probably not know any Spanish and correctly guess that ?internacional? means ?international? in English. However, there are other instances when the English word looks and sounds nothing like its Spanish counterpart. An example I gave the junior high students was the Spanish word for ?lungs.? If you knew no Spanish and were given a list of Spanish words from which to choose, it would probably take you a while before you guessed the right answer.

    If, on the other hand, you were in junior high and had just completed a unit on the respiratory system, you would be in much better shape. You would have learned that the pulmonary arteries carry blood from the heart to the lungs. Armed with the knowledge that ?pulmonary? relates to the lungs, you might venture to guess that the word in Spanish would look similar; and you?d be right. The word for ?lungs? in Spanish is ?pulmones,? derived from the Latin ?pulmo? (lung), from which we get ?pulmonary? in English.