My grandfather never learned a word of English. He was a shoemaker in Namangan, and he left school at twelve. Yet he taught me how an English word is built.
He played a game with me in his workshop. He would say a root — ish, uy, doʻst — and I had to build as many words from it as I could. Ish gave me ishchi, ishsiz, ishlamoq. Uy gave me uysiz and uychi, which made him laugh, because it is not a word. Doʻst gave me doʻstlik. "A word is not a stone," he used to say. "It is a piece of leather. You cut it and sew it, and it becomes a shoe."
Twenty years later, preparing for my first translation exam, I opened an English grammar and found his workshop inside it. Work became worker, just as ish became ishchi. Home became homeless, as uy became uysiz. Friend became friendship, and kind became kindness, the way doʻst becomes doʻstlik. Even the negatives were familiar. Our be-, borrowed from Persian, makes baxtli into bebaxt; English un- makes happy into unhappy. Our no- makes qonuniy into noqonuniy; English uses il- and turns legal into illegal.
The two factories are not identical. English has more prefixes than Uzbek. It also has traps. Hardly does not mean "in a hard way"; it means "almost not". And plenty of English words take in- before some roots and im- before others for reasons of sound: impossible, immature, but inactive.
Still, the habit he gave me works. When I meet an unfamiliar word now, I take it apart before I reach for a dictionary. Unbelievably is un- + believe + -able + -ly: four pieces, one meaning. Most long English words, it turns out, are only short ones wearing several attachments.
My grandfather died before I passed that exam. I like to think he would have found English understandable, perhaps even likeable — a language built, like his shoes, from pieces that fit together if you know where the seams go.