The Golden Key to English by
Tamara Eileen Galloway
There is a language that gives to whoever knows it a much deeper understanding of both English language and English literature. The percentage of English derived directly from this language is 28.24%, and the percentage of English derived from it through French is 28.3%.
Anyone who knows this language will automatically understand the hidden meanings of most English words without much effort. Did you know for example that from the one word ‘verto’, meaning turn, we get avert (turn away), averse, aversion, divert
(turn away towards something else), diverse, diversity, diversion, subvert (overturn), subversion, convert (turn into) and conversion?
That doesn’t include advertise, (gain your notice by turning you towards it) advertisement, adverse (turn you towards it in a negative sense), and adversary.
There’s also introvert (someone turned inward), extrovert (someone turned outward) and pervert (someone turned the wrong way).
Other words in this language give rise to whole sets of English words too! ‘Facio’, meaning do or make, gives us fact (something that has been done), factual, factor, confectionery (sweets that have been made) and confectioner.
In addition it gives us defect (something that has not been done properly), defection, defective, deficit (something that has not been done and so is lacking), deficient
(again, not done and therefore lacking) and deficiency.
This is especially true for complicated, academic or medical English words. Even more of these come from this language!
English spellings as well become much easier when you know it...
English is a Germanic language, but in German itself, the meanings of compound words are made up from native German words. So a German speaker can easily hear and see the parts a complicated word is made from.
Compound words in English though, are not built from simple English words. They come from this language instead. The classic example of this is peninsula, which comes from ‘paene’ meaning almost plus ‘insula’ which is an island. So peninsula means ‘almost island’.
Similarly valediction is from ‘vale’ (goodbye) and from ‘dico’ (say).
Now the grammar of the language I’m talking about is definitely not quite the same as the grammar of English. If you really want to understand the structure of modern
English, you’ll need to study (scientific) linguistics.

Nevertheless, some of the grammar is similar. Crucially, for many centuries, in fact until the twentieth century, scholars described the way English worked in terms of the grammar of this language.
Learning the structure of it will enable you to understand what on earth they meant.
You’ll be able to understand many quotes that have found their way into English too, even something as common as ‘cave canem’, as legalistic as ‘pro bono’, or as philosophical as ‘cogito ergo sum’.
School mottos tend to be in this language too. Mine was ‘Fortitudine Crescamus’
(May We Grow in Strength).
I hope I’ve shown you that this language really is the golden key to the English language.
That’s not all, though.
You’ll also have a head start with English Literature. Before the twentieth century,
English novels, stories, poems and plays assumed that their readers or audience knew not only this language, but also its myths and literature. There were two roots to most
English Literature, Christianity and classicism.
During the eighteenth century another root was well watered and started to grow: science including psychology. The classical root of English literature continued to be important well into the twentieth century...
Well, just in case you haven’t guessed it yet, this language is Latin!
(The statistics are from a computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the Shorter
Oxford Dictionary (third edition) published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas
Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973).)