The etymology of modern English vocabulary content introduction

Categories of Deceptively Transparent Words

The following classification is based on a corpus of errors collected over several years of teaching English as a Foreign Language to first year university students of Humanities and Social Sciences. They were all high school graduates, whose level of English was more or less equivalent to the Cambridge First Certificate of English. Since most of the course was devoted to reading comprehension, most of the collected errors were errors of misinterpretation. The deceptively transparent words (hence DT words) which induced errors seemed to fall into one of five distinct categories which will be described below.[3]

Words With A Deceptively Morphological Structure. These are words that look as if they were combined of meaningful morphemes. Thus, 'outline' was misinterpreted as 'out of the line', 'nevertheless' as 'never less', 'discourse' as 'without direction'. The learner's assumption here was that the meaning of a word equalled the sum of meanings of its components. This assumption is correct in the case of genuinely transparent words, but not when the 'components' are not real
morphemes.[4]
Idioms. 'Hit and miss', 'sit on the fence', 'a shot in the dark', 'miss the boat' were translated literally, word by word. The learner's assumption in the case of idioms was similar to that in the meaning of the whole was the sum of meanings of its parts.
False Friends. 'Sympathetic' was interpreted as 'nice' (Hebrew - 'simpati'); 'tramp' as lift (Hebrew - 'tremp'); 'novel' as 'short story' (Hebrew - 'novela'). The mistaken assumption of the learner in this case was that if the form of the word in L2 resembled that in LI, the meaning did so too.
Words With Multiple Meanings If often happens that students know one meaning of a polyseme, or a homonym and are reluctant to abandon it even when, in a particular context, its meaning is different. For example, 'since' was interpreted as 'from the time when' though it meant 'because'; 'abstract' as 'not concrete' instead of 'summary'; 'state' as 'country' instead of 'situation'. The mistaken assumption of the learner in this case was that the familiar meaning was the ONLY meaning.

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