Letterland Unit 29 - prefixes uni-, bi-, tri

Our Spanish English Project by Luis and Carlos

We have been learning about Latin number prefixes like uni-, bi-, and tri-. We thought it was cool that things had the number of wheels in their name: unicycle (1) , bicycle (2), and tricycle (3). Then we noticed that uni- looks like the Spanish number uno (one) and tri- is similar to tres (three). But we wondered why bi- isn’t anything like dos (two) .Our teacher explained that Spanish and English both have words that came from the Latin language of long ago. That means that many words are nearly the same in two languages. “But why don’t dos and bi- sound alike?” I asked. “Latin had more than one word for two, just like English has pair, couple, and duoto mean two.”“Hey, duo is kind of like dos,” we said in unison unisono. That started us looking for other similar words. – universo The earth, sun, stars, space — together as one. unicorn – unicornio I bet you know this one! – unico Something that is one of a kind, different from most others.biceps – biceps The two arm muscles you flex to say, “I’m so strong.” – bipedo An animal that uses two feet for walking. – binoculares Like a telecope, but two tubes to look through. triangle – triangulo An object with three sides, three angles, three points. We should warn you that some of these words sound a lot different even though the spelling is almost the same. If you want to hear the words, check out an English-Spanish dictionary online. Our teacher says we should study languages after high school at a universidad.