Germanic Vs Latinate
Suppose I were to attempt to convince you of some argument I desired to advance. Or, imagine I desired to paint an evocative image in a novel for you. What would be more advantageous to my cause — employing vocabulary with a latin or germanic origin?
Now say I were to try to show you why I’m right about something. Or, that I want to draw a scene in a book for you. What would be better — using words with latin or germanic roots?
You may have come across an argument that often makes the rounds online that says you can tell when someone’s trying to BS you because they’re using fancy, polysyllabic words with a French or Latin origin, instead of going for the more straightforward Germanic equivalents:
There is truth in this argument. After Normans conquered Britain, it became fashionable to try and imitate the victors by using French at Court. So, borrowed words that became commonplace in English were originally pretentious in the most genuine sense of the word. The fact that French was used to impress (and, without wishing to come across as an elitist snob, the fact that French was used by the idle upper classes) probably also explains why it is that French words (plain French words!) are more prevalent when it comes to intellectual or artistic pursuits (‘colour’, ‘argument’, ‘intellect’, ‘paint’, ‘language’) whereas most words that relate to basic needs and simple pleasures are of Germanic origin (‘eat’, ‘drink’, ‘trade’, ‘shop’, ‘make’, ‘house’, ‘sleep’, ‘play’, ‘run’, ‘game’).
The way this argument is usually made is in a critical spirit (see, e.g., Politics and the English Language): the suggestion is that the honest simplicity of Saxon words is superior to the decadent plumage of their Romance cousins (ironically, ‘honest’ and ‘simple’ both have Latin etymology). Part of me sympathises with this take. There are several reasons to use an abstruse word (such as ‘abstruse’) instead of a simple one, and most of them are bad — probably the most common ones are to hide the absence of meaning and confuse the listener or reader (see Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister), or to signal intelligence and erudition (instead of focusing on getting a point across).
But the underlying assumption of the pro-Saxon argument is that the sole objective of using language is to impart information (or the sole worthy objective, at any rate). This is clearly not true. Politicians, teachers, orators, authors, journalists, and laymen use language to inspire, motivate, please, scare, or edify their audiences — in other words, they aim to affect feelings, not just to address reason. Suggesting that this is somehow wrong — that we ought to rely on reason alone to influence people — is inhuman. It’s the same line of reasoning that led architects to rebel against any kind of ornament. If Orwell really felt that using any kind of misdirection to get a point across is wrong, he’d have only written essays instead of penning Animal Farm.
This raises the question, are Latin words more convincing? Are they more beautiful? I don’t know, but as it’s become my habit recently, I made an app to find out. So far, people seem to prefer Latin:
Interestingly, this preference is much more pronounced among non-native speakers:
Do with this what you will :)
How many things can you name?
By coincidence, a common theme across several books I’ve read or re-read recently is how little attention we all pay to the world around us. As Sherlock Holmes says, we see but we do not observe.
If you start to observe, you’ll very quickly realise that you don’t know the word for a huge number of things around you. For example, here are some things I see everyday, for which I did not know the word:
The ridges on leg desks is called fluting; those pillar-like ornaments (admittedly hard to see) in the second picture are pilasters, whereas the glazed tiles by the large rectangular windows are called faience; the strip of metal separating the paved path from the grass is called path edging (granted, had I had to guess, I’d have said something like that; but I didn’t know for sure that’s the term for it); and the tiles to help the blind know it’s the end of the pavement are called blister paving (there’s also corduroy and lozenge paving).
This is just a tiny sample of the myriads of details that surround us that most of us cannot call by their proper names. I think it’s a fun exercise to look at more things and ask GPT what they’re called — have a go!