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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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  1. Why does English uses Latin adjectives for so many nouns? It it to sound smart or because it's fundamentally bad at making adjectives as a language?
  2. Where can I find a list of them paired with their nouns?

For example, there's doggy bags and catty behavior and foxy ladies, but everything else is canine and feline and vulpine. Everyting about the sea is marine, everything about the birth is natal, everything about the king is regal or royal, everything about a son is filial, everything about a god is divine.

It feels like another of these upper-class word games, like the collective nouns for animals. "Hawhaw, hearty illness, you say! No, only a meal can be hearty, real hearts are cardiac!"

Latin was primarily associated with religion, diplomacy and academia, and only with aristocrats indirectly.

Large chunks of any language, including English, are really only used by a very small subgroup of speakers. This is especially true in an age before mass literacy. When intellectuals needed new poetic / technical terms, they would have reached for the language that they were used to using and would be easily understood by their correspondents abroad. I doubt they would have cared about excluding peasants, who were not literate and could not possibly be mistaken for one of them.

I think that class traps and an excess focus on manners became much more relevant as Britain got richer and the boundaries between the classes became more porous.