Welcome to
ESL Printables,
the website where English Language teachers exchange resources:
worksheets, lesson plans, activities, etc.
Our collection is growing every day with the help of many teachers. If
you want to download you have to send your own contributions.
Hello everyoneeeeeeee!!! Hope you all had a wonderful weekend, had a chance to relax and reload energies for tomorrow!!!!
I need some help, please. I will be working with my students the forms to change nouns into adjectives by adding suffixes: ous, y, ly, ful.
But, I KNOW more than one student will ask me, if there is a "rule" or guide to know which suffix to add. And I hate to say, I really don �t know. I just "know" which suffix to add, but I really never learned (blessed Alzheimer) any specific rule for this.
Does anyone know if there is actually a rule for this grammar point?
And, does anyone have a ws uploaded with exercises for this that I can download? It would be very helpful.
Thanks in advance! and enjoy what �s left or our Sunday!!!
There is no rule, and no logical reason why "wonderful" isn �t "wonderly," or "matronly" isn �t "matronous," or "flighty" isn �t "flightful," etc. etc.
It could actually have to do with the languages they were derived from. While I don �t know and haven �t stopped to think about it, certain endings could be paired with words derived from Greek, Latin, German, etc.
But today, when all those words have come together to form the lingual mishmash that is the English language, tracing those origins in order to determine a "rule" about how those suffixes are derived would be even more work than simply memorizing the suffixes.
and to make it worse, the suffixes are sometimes added many years after the root word entered the language, so they wouldn �t necessarily follow any rule that might have been in force.
I �m not aware of any specific uniform rules, but if you send me your e-mail address, I can attach a worksheet of mine that I made a while ago that provides a longish list of almost all suffixes with their meanings and examples, so let THEM figure out a rule if they can! They �ll never ask you the question again, I bet!