About 1.5 billion people speak English, that’s 20 per cent of the earth’s population, of which only about 360 million people use it as their first language. The biggest number, (over a billion), of English speakers just learnt it from others, mostly in school, making it the most studied language in the world. One reason the language is loved is its consistence in vocabulary structure where discovering the meaning of one part of a word leads to unlocking the meaning of several other words. For instance, if you know what to “judge” is, you can easily guess “judiciary” is related to “judge”. In the same way if you know what it is to be “just” or to have an “injury” you can easily know what “justice” and “jury” mean. In English language, root words such as jud, jus or jur are found in words connected to the law. The trio is borrowed from Latin where “jud” means “judge” while “jus” and “jur” relate to “law” and “rule”. This is why “prejudice” is related to judgement that is not based on reason or experience. Remember “pre” means “before” and “jud” means “judge” (literally before judging). Although the word “injury” basically means body harm in today’s English, it originally meant treating someone unfairly, or not according to the law. Taking “justice” as fairness according to the law, you can predict that to “justify” is to prove something right and acceptable. At this point, we should be able to relate “judiciary” with a body or authority of judges. Consider more words such as, jury, jurisdiction or jurist. One of the confusing words in this understanding of jud, jus or jur root words is the word “adjust”. Although there is an element of ‘putting things right’ in the word “adjust” it is not in the category we mentioned above because its root word is not “jus” but “juxta” which means “near” in Latin. If you know some vocabulary related to law, you have perhaps considered words such as “abjure” or “perjure”. When someone perjures themselves, they swear falsely about a formal promise but the word’s root word is “jurare”, a Latin word for “swear”. The writer is a professional English Language instructor
