Ablaut and Other Things

Latin and English have their differences, but I've been surprised by how closely related (relatively) they really are. A lot of the Latin vocabulary is easy to remember simply because it has a direct link to the English words we use today. For example, 'to see' is 'videre' in Latin-- even if I don't make the connection with "veni vidi vici", English words like 'view' and 'video' provide threads along which to determine meaning.

Today in Latin class, we learned about a feature shared throughout the happy family of Indo-European languages: ablaut. It wasn't an in-depth lesson, but as far as I can tell, ablaut is a German term referring to vowels shifting along with changing tenses (and possibly other things). Just as 'I sing' goes to 'I sang', 'cano' goes to 'cecini'. There's a lot going on behind the scenes with these languages, and while I'm not the one to figure out how these things work, it's fascinating to learn about.