W4 Vocab blog

Primitive

Let’s take a look at the five top nouns that follows “primitive” (=primitive + N.) in American English, namely  “art”, “life”, “people”, “sculpture”, and “man”. I screenshot the examples from an online corpus. Read the examples and make a guess about the meaning of “primitive”. Think about whether “primitive” has a positive, negative, or neutral meaning in the examples (Click the example pictures to see th enlarged images).

(1)    Primitive art



(2)    Primitive life

 

 

(3)    Primitive people

 

 

(4)    Primitive sculpture

 

 

(5)    Primitive man

 

 

(6)    What does “primitive” mean in the five phrases mentioned above.

 

   relating to human society at a very early stage of development, with people living in a simple way without machines or a writing system

       

(7)    Does “primitive” in the following five cases have a positive, negative, or neutral meaning?

Primitive + N.	Positive	Neutral	Negative
Primitive art		〇
Primitive life		〇
Primitive people			〇
Primitive sculpture		〇
Primitive man			〇

Primarily

(1)    What does “primarily” mean in the article. You may want to refer to the article to decide what it means.

　　　mainly

(2)    Find a synonym of “primarily”.

        essentially principally chiefly

(3)    “Primary” is the adjective of “primarily”. One of its meanings is “happening first”. Compare “primary” and “primitive”. Do you think the two adjectives have the same meaning in this sense? Why?

        I do not think they have exactly the same meaning. To me "primary" sounds simply "the first"  or "beginning," but "primitive" gives me a sense of "undeveloped" as well. Therefore I think they are similar but not the same.