If you’re an English student and also a native Spanish speaker, you’ve probably noticed that some vocabulary is very similar between the two languages, and wondered why English and Spanish share vocabulary so frequently.
Words like architect in English, when translated, simply become arquitecto. Hierarchy, another English word, is translated to jerarquia. The words sound very similar, and have the same definition, even though they belong to two different languages. Why is this?
The answer lies in the language that, in part, inspired Spanish, English, and many other languages – Latin.
Both English and Spanish have a heavy reliance on Latin vocabulary, roots, prefixes, suffixes, and grammatical structure. But as English and Spanish evolved separately within their own geographic regions and cultures, so did their usage of Latin, leading to the slight differences that we can see today.
How can I start learning about this?
Let’s assume you’re a Spanish speaker who is trying to improve your English vocabulary. Identifying some Latin words in your native language is likely to give you new vocabulary in English, as well, without the need to memorize a completely new word. You can do this by identifying roots, prefixes, and suffixes that belong to the Latin language.
For example, the root we already looked at – Arch. Almost every word with the root “Arch” is Latin in origin. Another extremely common example of this would be the Latin suffix -tion.
Any word in English ending with -tion (pronounced “shun”) is going to be extremely similar in Spanish, with the only changes usually coming in the form of spelling differences.
Some words are easy to identify as Latin (and therefore, shared with Spanish), because the differences between the two versions are very minor:
Other words can be a bit more difficult to identify, because the differences are larger. Try this quick test of your skills:
Can you identify the Latin word in this sentence?
The journey was going to be perilous, so I brought a knife.
To identify which word is Latin, there’s one simple method we can try. First, translate the sentence into Spanish –
El viaje iba a ser peligroso, así que traje un cuchillo.
Then, look to see which word (or words) is the most similar. In this case, the words “perilous” and “peligroso” are clearly related. If we do an Etymological search, we can see that these two words both evolved from the Latin word “periculum”, which simply means danger. Though they sound a bit different, these words both have the same definition – full of danger (or full of peril, if we wish to change “perilous” into its noun form).
Why are there so many advanced Latin words in English?
As you study Latin words used in Modern English and Spanish, you might notice that many Latin words relate to scientific fields. Even the term “etymology”, which means the study of language history, comes from Latin. We know this because of the suffix – “logy”, which means “the study of” something.
This is explained in one scientific journal, which states:
”In the early 1500’s, English started to be used in fields that had been dominated by Latin before. Such fields were theology, philosophy and natural sciences. These sciences underwent expansion and the consequence of this was that a special kind of vocabulary had to be created.”
Once again, the Latin words used in this paragraph have exact Spanish translations.
And, the words related to these fields and sciences are often also shared between English and Spanish.
As the collective scientific knowledge in these fields grew, so did our vocabulary. Of course, we needed new words to describe the things being learned. So, Latin-based vocabulary in English and Spanish became very widespread.
Conclusion
Almost every word that we use in English with Latin origin has an exact Spanish translation. So, studying Latin roots, suffixes, and prefixes is a great way of improving your level in all three languages at the same time.
For some study material related to this topic, I recommend you go through some of our reading/writing worksheets and try to find Latin-based words in each paragraph. I hope that helped explain why English and Spanish share vocabulary!
