A Spanish 'jornal' is a day's pay. An English journal is a diary. They're the same word, and they parted company somewhere in the Middle Ages.
'Jornal' is a borrowing rather than an inheritance, and Spanish has the inherited form too: 'día', straight from 'dies'. So the language holds two descendants of one Latin word that reached it by different routes and no longer look related. The giveaway is the 'j' - a sound Spanish took over with the Occitan word rather than developing itself.
Latin 'dies' ('day') produced the adjective 'diurnus' ('of the day, daily'), and from that came the Late Latin 'diurnalis'. That '-alis' ending is the '-al' still visible on the end of 'jornal' and on the end of English 'journal'. Spanish didn't inherit the word directly, though. It borrowed it in the medieval period from Occitan, spoken just over the Pyrenees, where 'jornal' already meant a day's work or the wage paid for it. Spanish kept the wage. English, coming at the same Late Latin word by a different road, kept the writing - the daily record. One Latin family, two entirely reasonable outcomes.
Eight large cards, plus a single reference sheet holding the whole word:
• the etymology comic - illustrated stage panels, one idea to a page, with short captions
• the word-history breakdown, Latin through Late Latin and Occitan to modern Spanish, with a date at each stage the record allows
• the borrowing panel, showing the word crossing from Occitania into Spain rather than descending directly
• the land-measure panel, on 'jornal' as an area of ground - as much as a day's work would cover
• the English-links section, setting 'journal' beside 'jornal' and naming the point where the two senses split
• the family panel, tying Spanish 'jornal' and 'jornada' to French 'jour', Italian 'giorno' and English 'journal'
• the sources page, and a short how-to-use guide for the adult
Two forms come out of the one PDF. Print the large cards single-sided, laminate them, trim, punch the top-left corner and thread them onto a binder ring - that's the deck, and the cards are numbered so a loose one goes back where it belongs. You build it yourself; it doesn't arrive assembled. The last page is the single sheet, the whole word laid out at once, which needs nothing but a printer and is the one to reach for mid-lesson. A laminator and a ring are only needed for the deck. The deck is a bag-and-table object rather than a pocket one.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Made first for tutoring students, but it suits a wider range:
• KS3 and KS4 learners working on Spanish vocabulary for work, money and daily life
• home-educated children learning Spanish
• learners with dyslexia or working-memory difficulties
• learners who already meet English cognates and want to know why they only half-match
• parents and adults studying alongside a child
This one asks a little more of the reader than the everyday words in the shop. 'Jornal' is not high-frequency Spanish, and the pack is most use to a learner who already has 'día' and 'jornada' and can hold two related words apart without them collapsing into each other. If that's still hard, start with 'jornada' - it's free.
English cognates are usually taught as a gift: the word looks familiar, so you already know it. 'Jornal' and 'journal' show what happens when that's only half true. A learner who assumes 'jornal' means a diary has been let down by a strategy that normally works, and the useful lesson isn't that cognates are unreliable - it's that a shared root guarantees a shared origin, not a shared meaning. Working through where the wage and the diary parted gives a learner something to do with a near-miss instead of simply being wrong.
In El Taller Raíz, the neighbours on this topic are 'jornada' (free), 'día', 'buenos días', 'hoy' and 'mediodía'.
On the same root: 'jornada' is the closest of all - the same Occitan borrowing with a different ending, and the pack that explains the day's-march sense. 'Día' is the inherited cousin, and 'mediodía' carries 'día' inside it.
Across the shops: Italian 'giornata' and 'giornale' come off the same Latin branch in L'Officina Radice, and French 'jour' is the same word again in L'atelier des mots.
Available now as a PDF download.
A Spanish 'jornal' is a day's pay. An English journal is a diary. They're the same word, and they parted company somewhere in the Middle Ages.
'Jornal' is a borrowing rather than an inheritance, and Spanish has the inherited form too: 'día', straight from 'dies'. So the language holds two descendants of one Latin word that reached it by different routes and no longer look related. The giveaway is the 'j' - a sound Spanish took over with the Occitan word rather than developing itself.
Latin 'dies' ('day') produced the adjective 'diurnus' ('of the day, daily'), and from that came the Late Latin 'diurnalis'. That '-alis' ending is the '-al' still visible on the end of 'jornal' and on the end of English 'journal'. Spanish didn't inherit the word directly, though. It borrowed it in the medieval period from Occitan, spoken just over the Pyrenees, where 'jornal' already meant a day's work or the wage paid for it. Spanish kept the wage. English, coming at the same Late Latin word by a different road, kept the writing - the daily record. One Latin family, two entirely reasonable outcomes.
Eight large cards, plus a single reference sheet holding the whole word:
• the etymology comic - illustrated stage panels, one idea to a page, with short captions
• the word-history breakdown, Latin through Late Latin and Occitan to modern Spanish, with a date at each stage the record allows
• the borrowing panel, showing the word crossing from Occitania into Spain rather than descending directly
• the land-measure panel, on 'jornal' as an area of ground - as much as a day's work would cover
• the English-links section, setting 'journal' beside 'jornal' and naming the point where the two senses split
• the family panel, tying Spanish 'jornal' and 'jornada' to French 'jour', Italian 'giorno' and English 'journal'
• the sources page, and a short how-to-use guide for the adult
Two forms come out of the one PDF. Print the large cards single-sided, laminate them, trim, punch the top-left corner and thread them onto a binder ring - that's the deck, and the cards are numbered so a loose one goes back where it belongs. You build it yourself; it doesn't arrive assembled. The last page is the single sheet, the whole word laid out at once, which needs nothing but a printer and is the one to reach for mid-lesson. A laminator and a ring are only needed for the deck. The deck is a bag-and-table object rather than a pocket one.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Made first for tutoring students, but it suits a wider range:
• KS3 and KS4 learners working on Spanish vocabulary for work, money and daily life
• home-educated children learning Spanish
• learners with dyslexia or working-memory difficulties
• learners who already meet English cognates and want to know why they only half-match
• parents and adults studying alongside a child
This one asks a little more of the reader than the everyday words in the shop. 'Jornal' is not high-frequency Spanish, and the pack is most use to a learner who already has 'día' and 'jornada' and can hold two related words apart without them collapsing into each other. If that's still hard, start with 'jornada' - it's free.
English cognates are usually taught as a gift: the word looks familiar, so you already know it. 'Jornal' and 'journal' show what happens when that's only half true. A learner who assumes 'jornal' means a diary has been let down by a strategy that normally works, and the useful lesson isn't that cognates are unreliable - it's that a shared root guarantees a shared origin, not a shared meaning. Working through where the wage and the diary parted gives a learner something to do with a near-miss instead of simply being wrong.
In El Taller Raíz, the neighbours on this topic are 'jornada' (free), 'día', 'buenos días', 'hoy' and 'mediodía'.
On the same root: 'jornada' is the closest of all - the same Occitan borrowing with a different ending, and the pack that explains the day's-march sense. 'Día' is the inherited cousin, and 'mediodía' carries 'día' inside it.
Across the shops: Italian 'giornata' and 'giornale' come off the same Latin branch in L'Officina Radice, and French 'jour' is the same word again in L'atelier des mots.
Available now as a PDF download.
