(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.

  • MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@fedia.io
    0·
    5 months ago

    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

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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

    4. 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.

    5. Also, the Church and Romans are mixed up in there somewhere, but I have forgotten how.