Essay: The Influence of Christianity on the Vocabularies of…

below is the instructions for the previous assignment and the new assignment. attached is the rubric and previous assignment for reference if needed along with its rubric and grading insight from the professor.

ENGL 634

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ESSAY ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS

OVERVIEW

There are two essays in this course. The first is on word histories and the second on the influence

of Christianity on the vocabularies of English.

INSTRUCTIONS

Your essays should reflect an appropriate level of research and should be documented in MLA or

APA format. Please be sure to review documentation style before you write and submit your

work. What is most to be sought after in these writings is insightful thinking and writing

appropriate to graduate level study.

Essay: Word Histories Assignment Instructions

This will be your major research assignment for this course. Etymology is the study of the

history of words, which most often occur in word families, in different related languages, with

different forms and meanings. Your assignment for this paper is to give as complete of an

account as you can of an Indo-European root found in an English word as well as in words of

other Indo-European languages. You should trace as many different forms of the root in as many

languages as you can, providing their different meanings and identifying semantic changes in

them. Though length is not a definitive criterion for this assignment, you should find that your

discussion of an Indo-European root and its descendants in English and other IE languages

should be about 2,500 words.

This is an uncommon type of essay in that it will have no real thesis. It will be more like a report

in which you will need to pay particular attention to the organization of the information. It will

likely be most convenient for you to look at the language families or individual languages in

which the root and its subsequent forms occur and to provide as comprehensive of a catalog of

these forms of the word and their meanings as possible. Often, words will occur in a number of

families such as Greek, Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, and so forth. You should be at least

slightly familiar with the languages that constitute these families, as often languages rather than

families will be named.

Of particular note in your discussions should be the meanings of the word in the different

languages. You should note semantic changes in particular. At times, you will find that both the

forms and the meanings of the related words in different languages stemming from the same root

vary widely. Often, particular semantic histories are lost to us, and these can only be observed

rather than explained. You should find yourself examining derivatives of roots in different

languages to get a full account of the breadth and variety of the meanings that have derived from

the root. After providing as comprehensive as possible of a history of the root and its descendant

forms in different languages, your essay should conclude with a summary statement on the

history of the word and its meanings, making what insightful observations are appropriate.

For this exercise, you will find the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots your

most valuable resource. However, you should also use other resources such as the Oxford

ENGL 634

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English Dictionary and other dictionaries to research and trace the forms and the meanings of

words as thoroughly as possible.

A list of possible words and their roots to research would be the following, although you may

certainly research any word of your own choosing.

ear, *ak- fable, *bh- bleach, *bhel- blow, *bhel-

bear, *bher- tree, *deru- deed, *dhe- deer, *dheu-

kind, *gene- yellow, *ghel- meet, *med- mad, *mei-

mind, *men- fang, *pag- flow, *pleu- right, *reg-

seat, *sed- same, *sem- shear, *(s)ker- stand, *sta