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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2515 thread views

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?

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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!"

Correct on the class games. What you're looking at is the remnant of linguistic layers in England: a Celtic native population conquered by Anglo Saxon Germanics who mostly achieved linguistic unity before being bulldozed by a French speaking upper class (whose descendants still disproportionately horde wealth and power today), with a parasite population of Latin speakers with significant influence.

The medieval church neither spoke Latin(Latin was a liturgical/scholastic language and not spoken) nor was more parasitic than the nobles were.

There is a separate trend of church-educated but themselves secular writers adopting Latinate spellings which made no sense- that’s where the b in debt and the p in receipt came from- but most Latin influence was either loan words from the Anglo-Saxon era(eg wine) or a loan word with a perfectly reasonable explanation for why it came from Latin. The bulk of English’s romance vocabulary is French in origin, not Latin.

The medieval church neither spoke Latin(Latin was a liturgical/scholastic language and not spoken) nor was more parasitic than the nobles were.

Latin was certainly capable of being used in communication between educated Europeans. Which was parasitic, in the sense that it was unnatural. There was no native population of latin speakers who grew up speaking latin because it is what they heard at home, everyone who learned latin had to be taught latin as a second language.

Nothing could be more natural than parasitism.

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