We've seen some rules to determine the gender of a noun in Spanish. But language is usually like life, a lot of rules don't apply sometimes. This might be the case of it. Heterónimos in Spanish have a different word to talk about ladies & gentlemen.If we look at the word itself and we break it down we find:
hetero- which is a prefix we borrowed from the Greek language and means "distinct, different, other"
ónimo- a greek suffix that meant "name"
After the analysis we put the pieces together and we see that the buzzword means "a different name" which clarifies a bit our purpose.
It is worth it to do this deep comprehension practices with your students, they might like to know the history of the words (sometimes;)
We are plenty of examples in our languages from this structure but two will be enough to illustrate the idea: sinónimo / antónimo.
Along with this brief lines about today's topic there is a visual resource ready to use in class.
Data is not information, information is not knowledge,
knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.
Clifford Stoll
