I love watching brilliant kids performing at contests. And, Spelling Competition is one of my favorite shows (no matter which country it's held in).
The kid on fifth minute of the video asks for the origin of the word. And not this kid, I have observed many asking the same. Certainly, it surprises me that they spell toughest words on the basis of their origin.
How does origin help here? In that video, the spelling of the word 'prosaic' is asked and the kid is asking the origin (Latin) and spelling it correctly. Let's guess that the quiz-master said the origin Greek; would have it changed the spelling of the word 'prosaic'?
I'm poor at spelling out the words, I admit! And, I know that the list of advices may go long but then answering here the basic rule and giving out the links will help me. The users here are better in explaining things than books do 😉
Best Answer
It is because different languages have different rules for how things are spelled. If you have knowledge of the language, you have a good chance of spelling the word correctly, even if you are unfamiliar with it. Of course, wow much this helps depends on the language. Some languages are "more" phonetic than others. I studied Japanese and if you gave me a word and said it came from Japanese, I would almost definitely be able to spell it, even if I had never heard of it before.
As an example, let's say there was a word that end with something that sounded like "each-ee"
If the word came from Italian, I would guess that the ending was spelled "icci".
If it came from Japanese, I would say "ichi"
Romanian, "eci".
Old English? Who knows.