Word Web by
Jun Kyu & Julia

Matrix compiled by Jun Kyu & Lesley Catterall Dec 2003

Jun Kyu Baek was a young 4th grade Korean student who I had the pleasure of working with in Kuala Lumpur in December 2003. We had only had about 3 sessions together when we were presented with this orthographic challenge.

A Determined Word Detective

The Detective

The Challenge

In a piece he was writing, Jun Kyu had written the word <*determind>. When analysing it, he wrote the word sum <*deter + mind> identifying <mind> as the base element. He went on to explain that when you were determined your mind was set firm. Pretty sound thinking—for a student new to English and orthographic analysis!

Jun Kyu then needed to prove his hypothesis and this meant defining the supposed prefix <deter->. A school dictionary reference gave a definition of “to discourage or prevent from acting” but we needed more information than that to determine if the word was indeed a prefix and had any relevance in Jun Kyu’s rendition of <*determind>. See inset.

Jun Kyu’s hypothesis had collapsed. If <deter> was not the prefix then what could be? The analysis into <deter> had given Jun Kyu a clue. This was his resulting word sum: <*de + term + ind>.

Text Box: <deter> The base of <deter> is <ter> whose relatives are words such as <terrify>, <terrible>. The denotation of the Latin root was ‘fright, dread, fear’. The proper denotation of <deter> must then involve the use of fear. A definition from a 1933 Shorter Oxford Dictionary illustrates this denotation: deter: to restrain from acting or proceeding by any consideration of danger or trouble Definition provided by Melvyn Ramsden

The problem here was that Jun Kyu knew that there was no suffix <*-ind> however he did know of <-ine> from words like <medicine> and <imagine>. So could this be the suffix he was after? With some further investigation into the other suffixes that could work with <-ine> and confirmation of his revised spelling with the dictionary, Jun Kyu produced the following word sum:
<de + term + ine/ + ed>. He had found the correct structure of the word and the correct base.

Jun Kyu went on to investigate fully this new term he had discovered. He was determined to exterminate all doubt on the terminal nature of the spelling of this word.

Word Web

Using various dictionaries and research tools, Jun Kyu and his sister Julia built a word web of all the words they could find that used the base <term>. Jun Kyu checked to ensure that the meaning was indeed related to the denotation of ‘end, limit’ and included this in his web.

The web on the left shows the results of this study.

Etymological Tree

While collecting his words, Jun Kyu also collected evidence of the various roots that these terms had stemmed from and their pathways through time and via other languages that brought them into English (ie, diachronic etymology) .

Below is a summary of his investigation.

The Matrix

Finally, once Jun Kyu had all his evidence, we worked together to produce a word matrix for <term> that was able to accommodate all the words from his word web. The result is below on the left.

The Study

Etymological Tree
by Jun Kyu

Conclusion

Not all word investigations result in such a comprehensive study. Some may terminate at the word web stage, some may go straight to the matrix. Others though, like this one, may have questions arising from a term’s path through time and so, in those cases, examining the etymological pathways can provide a much clearer understanding of the relationship between words.

Jun Kyu was a pioneering word detective.