Patriotism In The English Language

Patriot is a noun that describes someone who is a loyal, lover and supporter of their country. Many dictionaries state that it is a person who is strongly devoted and willing to lay down their life for their homeland. A soldier who fought for their country would be considered a patriot. In most of the western world, many people proudly label themselves a patriot. However, the English language is constantly changing over time, and the meanings and nature of words are constantly changing too. Patriotism was not always a proud label people had used to describe themselves.

Patriot was first introduced to the English language a very long time ago, in the 1590s. Like many words in English, it was loaned from an old French word (patriote) and a Latin word (patriota). Loan words are terms that have been taken from other languages and used in English, mostly Latin, French and Greek as they have always had a heavy

Common suffixes such as as –ism and –tic would be added to the end of the word in order to convert it form a noun to other nouns and adjectives. Suffixes are small units that we add to the end of a word. In the same way that expressionism is the practice of expressing yourself, patriotism is the practice of being a patriot. We could also describe someone’s dedication to their country as ‘patriotic’. We could convert further and use the adverb when our friend is ‘patriotically’ speaking about their country. People added common prefixes, which are units that are added to the front of a word. The most common ones are anti- (meaning against), semi- (meaning half) and un- (meaning not). This allowed people more freedom when they said someone is an ‘anti-patriot’, or a ‘semi-patriot’. These are extremely common transformations in English, you will be able to identify this in other words and based on the nature of the suffix you can determine what these transformations