fringere?

Latin Learning Latin
1

On page 126 of LLPSO Orberg explains effractis as follows:

ef-fringere, -fregisse, -fractum < ex + frangere
I’m perplexed: usually when he separates words with a hyphen he’s pointing out that it’s formed from another word and the suggestion is that here we join ef to fringere to get effringere.

However fringere is, to my knowledge, not a Latin word - or is it?

2

It’s frangere, but in compounds most verbs with an initial short -a- in their stem replace it with a short -i-. Hence you get capio producing the compounds accipio, recipio etc., and rapio becoming corripio, arripio etc.

This is one of those little secrets of Latin that the books, for some reason, rarely tell you.