Word up

In 2005, Brunner was named Teen Ink magazine’s educator of the year.
Photo by Jack Looney.

For Brett Brunner (MA English ’88), the old adage, if you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself, is more like a way of life. As a classicist, English vocabulary enthusiast and Latin teacher on a constant search for the perfect etymology textbook, Brunner grew more and more dissatisfied with the comprehensiveness of the texts available on the market.

“There wasn’t really anything out there that was complete,” says Brunner. “I wanted to make something that was visually striking to illustrate fully the power of what Latin and Greek can do.”

So rather than making do, an original idea surfaced after Brunner successfully designed his own Latin and Greek etymology course in the mid-1990s. Combining his love of languages with his passion for precision, he dove headfirst into a project which became what he calls the most comprehensive etymology textbook to date: “Word Empire.” Brunner has worked solo on three versions of “Word Empire” over a period of 10 years, reformatting earlier editions while streamlining the latest edition, “Word Empire III: Clarity,” which is available on CD-ROM. To date, the text has been a welcome addition to many homes and classrooms around the country, and is distributed through venues such as the American Classical League, Worldlanguage.com and his own website, www.wordempire.com.

To ensure a complete word list for his latest text, Brunner scrutinized and collated the words from 22 dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary and 20 miscellaneous reference sources, which he formatted into lists based on a word’s Latin or Greek root. Building upon the concept of lexical aesthetics, Brunner designed his text in the shape of a tree, with a Latin or Greek root word on the bottom of the page, and its derivatives sloping vertically upward. By studying standardized tests like the SAT and GRE, Brunner was able to separate the derivatives according to specific grade levels, ranging from elementary school vocabulary to professional parlance. Words are also color-coded according to the different disciplines in which they belong, such as SAT-level, GRE-level, professional level and “wizard level” words. (“Wizard level” refers to words that will probably never be seen in print other than in an unabridged or specialized dictionary.) “Word Empire III: Clarity” contains 1,172 annotated trees (view an example here), as well as 477 seedlings, or words that have derivatives but are not prolific enough to form trees.

“The tree formation helps to show how the roots of the English language stem from a single Latin or Greek root,” Brunner says. “The whole thing behind English is it’s the largest language in the world, so I figured there’s got to be an easier way for students to learn, other than memorizing lists of words that are unrelated.”

To help students make the connection between roots and their derivatives, Brunner also teaches online SAT courses targeting the verbal section.

“Approximately 90 to 95 percent of all English vocabulary with more than one syllable comes from Latin and Greek, as well as 90 to 95 percent of GRE and SAT vocabulary,” Brunner says. “Students can look at the book and say ‘This is why I’m studying Latin, and this is what I can learn from it.’”

According to Brunner, the key to engaging students in the classroom is to make learning both beneficial and fun. In fact, he has also published a teacher’s guide to motivating students, “Chaos Motivation: A Utilitarian Guide to Teaching in the Middle and Upper Schools,” which he has presented at several conferences around the nation.

Although Brunner had held teaching positions at private, college-prep schools across the country for 16 years, he has called Charlottesville home for the past three. But dissecting dictionaries and writing teacher guides are not his only pastimes; he and his wife, Marguerite, also run Twin Moons Grange, a hobby farm where they raise sheep, chickens, donkeys and goats, and grow organic vegetables. In his spare time, Brunner does plenty of reading, coaches his son’s soccer team and regularly practices yoga.

His teaching career, on hold during the years he home-schooled his two children, will resume again as he moves on to lead the middle school Latin program at Tandem Friends School in Charlottesville. Using his Word Empire arsenal and his unique teaching methodology, Brunner hopes he can continue to introduce his students to the power of language and inspire a passion similar to his own.

“I think most of the world’s problems can be eliminated if people could communicate more effectively,” Brunner says. “Language is the primary tool of humans, and the better we can employ that tool the better a world we can all build.”