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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2498 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?

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!"

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.

Maybe the church wasn't more parasitic than the nobles. That wasn't the claim.

The church was definitely parasitic. By the time of Henry VIII, the church owned an estimated 1/4rd to 1/3rd of the arable land in England.

Prebuttal: The instant temptation will be to reply that much of Britain's land today is owned by a few groups. Let's consider the differences. First, we're talking about arable land not just uninhabited Scottish scrubland or whatever. Secondly, this was a time when most real wealth was tied up in arable land. Agriculture represented more than half the economy as opposed to a tiny percentage today. Religious groups were hoarding a large amount of the country's wealth. Imagine if 1/3rd of the stock market, and 1/3rd of the real estate in every city center, etc.. was owned by the church. That's what it was like.

I've often thought about the dissolution of the monasteries and what a modern equivalent would be. The closest I've come up is a state seizure of college endowments or some sort of modern land reform (apartments converted to condos and renters given ownership and as well as the elimination of second home ownership).

I also think the lenses of the historical event should be weighed against how Henry VIII squandered the country and his personal financial position he inherited from his father and grandmother (both extraordinarily wealthy) on foreign wars court expenses.

I've often thought about the dissolution of the monasteries and what a modern equivalent would be. The closest I've come up is a state seizure of college endowments or some sort of modern land reform

In terms of the scale necessary, we'd probably have to go after Social Security. I can't think of anything else which would have a similar scale. In the U.S., all the university endowments combined only amount to $802 billion, but we spend $1.4 trillion on Social Security every year. Assuming an endowment spends 4% of its value per year, Social Security is 43 times larger than university endowments.

Even though Henry squandered the money he stole from the monasteries, the later absence of these wasteful institutions led to long term benefits for England. Certainly the countries that underwent the Reformation pulled ahead of those that remained Catholic.

Likewise, a modern society that stopped redistributing wealth to already rich elders and started investing in the young would reap large rewards. First step, a $100,000 annual tax deduction for each dependent child.

While social security coffers might match the scale, those are resources already utilized by the government. A key component is government seizure of wealth outside their control to use for their own ends.

For the effects of the Protestant revolution and country development I think that discussion is outside of the purview of a Small-questions thread. Most Catholic countries also went through some sort of Church wealth seizure at some point. I think the differences in country success is more a question of who had coal reserves.

$1.4 trillion on Social Security every year

Sounds like a lot, but that's just 4000 per person.

16,000 per family of four. Median household income is like 70,000. It’s gigantic.

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