Do you also think english as a language has a lot of “replacement” words instead of descriptive words, compared to your own language?

16 comments

1. British english borrows a lot of words from Indian languages. Some of that is in international english and some is not.

2. As a Spanish speaker I think the polar opposite. Like how the fuck didi they come up with “watermelon”? It’s not a damn melon! And don’t get me started on strawberry!

3. Do you mean politicians use those “replacement words” in debates? Or journalists when the cover those debates in the press?

   Might have to do with who speaks to whom. Two political scientists talking about politics might use different – more scientific – terms then a barkeeper with a guest or a journalist who tried to address as many diverse people as possible.

   I mean, the tabloids are infamous for the very simple headlines they use.

   With regards to medical terms, I think we had a movement in Germany when a lot of latin and greek terms were translated into German, like Bauchspeicheldrüse for Pankreas. So unless two physicians are talking to each other people will use the German word instead of the medical correct term. That seems to be different in English, where they mostly use the latin/greek terms.

4. These are mostly because English is a Germanic language that had a lot of Norman French vocublary injected into it, so there are many cases where English has a Germanic and a Latinate word for the same thing: baby vs infant, body vs corpus, brotherly vs fraternal, cow vs bovine, fatherly vs paternal, first vs primary, freedom vs liberty, god vs deity, hen vs poultry, skilled vs adept, heart vs cardia, spade vs spatula, etc.

5. The phenomenon you described stems from English being a Germanic language with a massive Latin influence (usually through French), so they adopted many originally Latin loanwords, at the same time keeping their native, Germanic synonyms.

   Things like *freedom* / *liberty*, *speed* / *velocity*, etc. Over time they might have become more context-based, but they mean the same in the end.

   Swedish and German, which you mentioned, lacked such influence and kept their Germanic vocabulary. The same goes for the majority of other European languages, as English is an unusually mixed up one.

   In Poland there was a linguistic phenomenon called *makaronizm*, where in the 18th century it was considered cool and distinctive of the nobility to throw in many Latin words when speaking Polish. The more you used, the more educated and sophisticated you seemed. This has faded away as a temporary fashion though, whereas in English it probably started as a similar mechanism but way earlier, and got carved into the language permanently.

6. I am not sure what do you mean, to be honest. It seems for me you just described a concept of synonyms, which are obviously used in every language. Specific professions and situations may use own jargon which is absolutely not unique to english either.

7. What you noticed is actually quite pedestrian, average, banal, not really that special.

   It’s always possible in a language to express a concept in multiple ways, including the ability to use a specific noun or use a phrase. It’s also extremely common for a language to have multiple expressions for the same concept that come from different historical periods (including from borrowing from other languages).

   To give you an example from Greek, a cameraman can be referred as:

   * kámeraman (recent loanword from English)
   * operatér (older loanword from French)
   * kinimatografistís (‘cinematographer’, formal register word created in the 20th century with only Greek roots, mostly for cinema)
   * ikonolíptis (‘picture-taker’, as above, mostly for TV)
   * aftos pu vgázi víndeo (lit. “he who takes a video”, a phrase)

8. To get to “modern English” you start with a 5th century Germanic language, mix it with 11th century French, and then start bolting on bits of whatever you can find – Latin and Greek for technical terms, all sorts of things they picked up in the colonial era from Hindi, Urdu, Chinese, all over the place.

   You might find it illustrative to have a look at the parody scientific text ” Uncleftish Beholding” by the Science Fiction writer Paul Anderson, which is a tongue-in-cheek attempt at showing what a scientific paper might look like if stripped of all it’s non-English loan words. It makes sense, particularly if you know non-standard British dialects, but it’s quite odd:

   For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

   The underlying kinds of stuff are the firststuffs, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

   The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.

   At first it was thought that the uncleft was a hard thing that could be split no further; hence the name. Now we know it is made up of lesser motes. There is a heavy kernel with a forward bernstonish lading, and around it one or more light motes with backward ladings. The least uncleft is that of ordinary waterstuff. Its kernel is a lone forwardladen mote called a firstbit. Outside it is a backwardladen mote called a bernstonebit. The firstbit has a heaviness about 1840-fold that of the bernstonebit. Early worldken folk thought bernstonebits swing around the kernel like the earth around the sun, but now we understand they are more like waves or clouds.

   In all other unclefts are found other motes as well, about as heavy as the firstbit but with no lading, known as neitherbits. We know a kind of waterstuff with one neitherbit in the kernel along with the firstbit; another kind has two neitherbits. Both kinds are seldom.

   The next greatest firststuff is sunstuff, which has two firstbits and two bernstonebits. The everyday sort also has two neitherbits in the kernel. If there are more or less, the uncleft will soon break asunder. More about this later.

   The third firststuff is stonestuff, with three firstbits, three bernstonebits, and its own share of neitherbits. And so it goes, on through such everyday stuffs as coalstuff (six firstbits) or iron (26) to ones more lately found. Ymirstuff (92) was the last until men began to make some higher still.

   It is the bernstonebits that link, and so their tale fastsets how a firststuff behaves and what kinds of bulkbits it can help make. The worldken of this behaving, in all its manifold ways, is called minglingken. Minglingers have found that as the uncleftish tale of the firststuffs (that is, the tale of firststuffs in their kernels) waxes, after a while they begin to show ownships not unlike those of others that went before them. So, for a showdeal, stonestuff (3), glasswortstuff (11), potashstuff (19), redstuff (37), and bluegraystuff (55) can each link with only one uncleft of waterstuff, while coalstuff (6), flintstuff (14), germanstuff (22), tin (50), and lead (82) can each link with four. This is readily seen when all are set forth in what is called the roundaround board of the firststuffs.

   When an uncleft or a bulkbit wins one or more bernstonebits above its own, it takes on a backward lading. When it loses one or more, it takes on a forward lading. Such a mote is called a farer, for that the drag between unlike ladings flits it. When bernstonebits flit by themselves, it may be as a bolt of lightning, a spark off some faststanding chunk, or the everyday flow of bernstoneness through wires.

   Coming back to the uncleft itself, the heavier it is, the more neitherbits as well as firstbits in its kernel. Indeed, soon the tale of neitherbits is the greater. Unclefts with the same tale of firstbits but unlike tales of neitherbits are called samesteads. Thus, everyday sourstuff has eight neitherbits with its eight firstbits, but there are also kinds with five, six, seven, nine, ten, and eleven neitherbits. A samestead is known by the tale of both kernel motes, so that we have sourstuff-13, sourstuff-14, and so on, with sourstuff-16 being by far the most found. Having the same number of bernstonebits, the samesteads of a firststuff behave almost alike minglingly. They do show some unlikenesses, outstandingly among the heavier ones, and these can be worked to sunder samesteads from each other.

   Most samesteads of every firststuff are unabiding. Their kernels break up, each at its own speed. This speed is written as the half-life, which is how long it takes half of any deal of the samestead thus to shift itself. The doing is known as lightrotting. It may happen fast or slowly, and in any of sundry ways, offhanging on the makeup of the kernel. A kernel may spit out two firstbits with two neitherbits, that is, a sunstuff kernel, thus leaping two steads back in the roundaround board and four weights back in heaviness. It may give off a bernstonebit from a neitherbit, which thereby becomes a firstbit and thrusts the uncleft one stead up in the board while keeping the same weight. It may give off a forwardbit, which is a mote with the same weight as a bernstonebit but a forward lading, and thereby spring one stead down in the board while keeping the same weight. Often, too, a mote is given off with neither lading nor heaviness, called the weeneitherbit. In much lightrotting, a mote of light with most short wavelength comes out as well.

   For although light oftenest behaves as a wave, it can be looked on as a mote, the lightbit. We have already said by the way that a mote of stuff can behave not only as a chunk, but as a wave. Down among the unclefts, things do not happen in steady flowings, but in leaps between bestandings that are forbidden. The knowledge-hunt of this is called lump beholding.

   Nor are stuff and work unakin. Rather, they are groundwise the same, and one can be shifted into the other. The kinship between them is that work is like unto weight manifolded by the fourside of the haste of light.

   By shooting motes into kernels, worldken folk have shifted samesteads of one firststuff into samesteads of another. Thus did they make ymirstuff into aegirstuff and helstuff, and they have afterward gone beyond these. The heavier firststuffs are all highly lightrottish and therefore are not found in the greenworld.

   Some of the higher samesteads are splitly. That is, when a neitherbit strikes the kernel of one, as for a showdeal ymirstuff-235, it bursts into lesser kernels and free neitherbits; the latter can then split more ymirstuff-235. When this happens, weight shifts into work. It is not much of the whole, but nevertheless it is awesome.

   With enough strength, lightweight unclefts can be made to togethermelt. In the sun, through a row of strikings and lightrottings, four unclefts of waterstuff in this wise become one of sunstuff. Again some weight is lost as work, and again this is greatly big when set beside the work gotten from a minglingish doing such as fire.

   Today we wield both kind of uncleftish doings in weapons, and kernelish splitting gives us heat and bernstoneness. We hope to do likewise with togethermelting, which would yield an unhemmed wellspring of work for mankindish goodgain.

   Soothly we live in mighty years!

9. What you see as unnecessary ‘replacement words’ I see as a lack of diversity in the vocabulary of other languages.

   You see it as a negative, I see it as a positive.

10. I’m not too sure about norwegian, but [this 5:00](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aMA3M6b9iEY) is why they do what you said in english

11. Yeah English is terrible for that. It leads to a lot of regional colloquialisms which kinda divides people if we’re being honest. It feels very cliquey. I think part of that is due to English being such a whore of a language…it’s literally a Germanic base with Celtic & Norse borrowings and then a Latin (from Norman French) structure on top of it all and of course countless stolen words from other languages. It’s still a beautiful language but there is no denying it’s a bit of a mess lol.

12. Synonyms don’t mean EXACTLY the same thing, if that’s what you’re referring to?

    Handy thing about that is one can be very specific. The drawback, is that because of the specificity, it is often cringey when people use a synonym that isn’t quite correct because of the context in which they use it. When I was in school, people used to swap the Germanic for the Latin for example, but it doesn’t sound right.

    I love this aspect of language, and I assumed it was the same in most languages? Surely synonyms in other languages mean slightly different things? Like I’m not going to call a well-spoken talkative man ‘garrulous’. Surely it’s the same in other languages?

13. I’m going to go against most of the other commenters here and say that I can kind of see what you’re getting at. It does in some ways make the written language less penetrable and intuitive unless you have a good education and a high reading level, which therefore also makes it more exclusionary. Anglophone countries have relatively low levels of functional literacy by developed country standards, and while English spelling (and other socio-economic issues/lack of funding for education etc) is obviously the main reason for this, I’m sure the Latinate vocabulary contributes to it too, especially since those words tend to be reserved for more formal, technical speech, unlike in langages like, say, Hindi or Romanian where non-native loanwords aren’t necessarily as associated with higher registers of speech in the same way.

    Somebody else on this thread posted an Anglish text about uncleftish beholding, and honestly I found it surprisingly clear and easy to read. And for a person who lacks education and basic scientific knowledge and has a relatively low reading level, it would probably be easier to read than an equivalent text in normal English about atoms and nuclear fission and whatnot.

    Does that mean that English borrowing words from other languages is *bad* per se? Well, no, obviously not. But I think there is a case to be made for style guides to discourage the use of a French/Latin word where a near-identical synonym of Anglo-Saxon origin can be used to say the same thing, in order to improve clarity and readability.

    (And before you ask, yes I know I’m terrible at writing and don’t practice as I preach).

14. The examples given in the OP are much more an American English concept than European English. We never really use terms such as incarcerated and very rarely incumbent. I think Americans have a greater tendency to try to use technical terms in everyday speech, whereas we’d be much more inclined to use common terms like in prison/prisoner and current/outgoing PM for example.

15. Norwegian has a lot of loan words, but now it is more trending to make a new Norwegian word for something new rather than importing a word and “norwegianise” it.

    Most recent I can think of is the word “emneknagg”, which is the Norwegian word for hashtag. The literal translation is subject hook.

16. As others have pointed out, English has a history that has enriched the language with words from French, Latin and elsewhere.

    Very often it is a question of register: i.e. who is speaking or writing. Latin-derived words are usually more formal.

    A doctor will say *cardiac arrest*. The patient will say *heart attack*.

    The airport announcement will say *the flight departing from*… The ground attendant will say *leaving from*…

    Newspapers (or their digital equivalents) often use shorter, Germanic words in their headlines – probably because historically they took up less space on the page: *seek* instead of *look for* or *try to find*, *quit* instead of *resign*, etc.

    As I said: it all depends who is speaking/writing and to whom.