(non-native speaker)
Is there a reason why the English language has “special” words for a specific topic, like related to court (plaintiff, defendant, warrant, litigation), elections/voting (snap election, casting a ballot)?
And in other cases seems lazy, like firefighter, firetruck, homelessness (my favorite), mother-in-law, newspaper.
You must log in or register to comment.
Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat? A lot of the law related words are from French derivations AFAIK?
Domain specific language is found across all realms of society, even firefighters have words or phrases with a specific meaning (back-burning, pumper, appliance, etc). So maybe its not that some areas are lazy, its just that you haven’t been exposed to their more technical side?
Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat?
A language is not its vocabulary; that’s like pretending that the critter is just its fur.
English vocabulary is from multiple sources, but that is not exactly unique or special.
Law terminology specifically can seem pretty archaic because there’s a high need for terms to be stable over time. In other fields and everyday speech terms can change over time. There’s contracts signed decades or even centuries ago that are still binding today. So it’s practical in a sense if the words within and those used to discuss legal dealings don’t change over time.
Language is always evolving. A lot of “special” words are just lazy words that have fallen out of regular use over time, or have be pulled out of time and place to evoke the seeming of being old and authoritative. Sometimes "special” words or phrases are just memes used out of context, and sometimes the context is no longer relevant or it is forgotten. We have a “special” word for phases like that: Idioms. The rule for idioms is “Idioms mean what they mean”
Second point: the English language is heavily influenced by several historical processes
WARNING: I am not a linguist or historian and the following is greatly simplified, potentially to the point of falsity-
The invasions of Germanic tribes: Angles & Saxons most notably, settled in what we now call England (Angle Land) and pushed the Celtic tribes west and north. Leaving mostly Germanic speaking peoples in the south and East.
-
The Vikings raids: another wave of Germanic speaking peoples raided and eventually settled in parts of the island, while no less violent than the earlier invasions, it did result in more intermingling of the local Germanic and the Norse Germanic languages than the previous Germanic/Celtic languages did.
-
The Norman Conquest: This invasion was more of a top-down invasion, where a French speaking monarchy replaced the English speaking monarchy. For a time French became the language of esteem, and state business was conducted in French, while outside the aristocracy, the common folk would use common English in their day-to-day. This is why a lot of modern legal and technical words, like litigate, defendant and plaintiff, have roots through French while rude words (“vulgar” comes from the Latin for “common”) often have Germanic roots. See: penis/vagina/intercourse vs. dick/cunt/fuck
-
Colonization and globalization: English speakers went out and invaded a lot of places. In addition to extracting resources, wealth and slaves from those places, they took a lot of words too, and just kinda squished them into the language where they could fit. Colonizers also forced English upon the invaded territories much like the Norman’s forced French upon England. Now you have many more English speakers in the world who are also have fusing their own languages into local dialects of English and English words into their native languages. All this gets mixed up into an era of global trade, travel and communication, and some words just get caught up in the global zeitgeist and make their way into common English usage.
-
Also, the Church and Romans are mixed up in there somewhere, but I have forgotten how.
-
All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.
What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.
For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:
- compounding - pick old word, add a new root, the meaning is combined. Like “firetruck” - a “truck” to deal with “fire”. You can do it recursively, and talk for example about the “firetruck tire” (the space is simply an orthographic convention). Or even the “firetruck tire rubber quality”.
- affixation - you get some old word and add another non-root morpheme. Like “home” → “homeless” (no home) → “homelessness” (the state of not having a home).
The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).
Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.
Can someone explain why a job application called “resume”, like in Play/Pause/Resume?
How is it relevant?
(I’m learning English as second language).
Edit: So we’re speaking French now? What? Why? You guys butchered so many words already, can you just made up one more?
Ps: Is that also the case with the word “fiancé”? I’ve been wondering where the hell did that “é” came from.
“They both come from the same French word, résumer. The Latin root of that word could be translated as “to take back” (and you can see that use on occasion, as when a deposed king “resumes the throne”), but the core meaning that links resume and résumé could better be translated as “to come back to” — in one case, to come back to an activity; in the other, to go over a series of events again in brief.”
But I’ll tell you as a native English speaker, we almost never think about words like that having different meanings and origins. We’re just really used to homographs and homophones.
It really depends on how the vocabulary got to the language.
First, you have to start with the fact that English is a Germanic language with a lot of French words in it due to the Normans. A good example is that farm animal names have a Germanic origin typically while the words for meat have more French origins.
You can also combine it with the fact that English was rather varied in its vocabulary at the time. An example is eggs/eyren. Egg won out as a word, but there were likely thousands of these decisions being made as the language standardized.
Then, include that a lot of legal and religious terms came from Latin; with the practices using Latin far beyond when English became the dominant language in England. So, for these fields, just use a mangled version of the Latin root.
Finally, it depends on how a word enters the English language. Maybe it comes from another language, so we just use a version of that word. Maybe the creator of the word just makes something up. Maybe the creator just slapped a word on something that wasn’t typically used; the wiki from Wikipedia comes from the name of a Hawaiian bus.
It is a strange, made-up way of naming things, but language itself is made up thing.
