On 07 May 2007, at 1:02 PM, Christine Kent wrote:
Basic rule is speak English not Latin (or Greek, or Latin via French).
English words tend to be simple single syllable words that everyone
understands; Latin and Greek have many syllables and are designed to
differentiate between the working classes (the Celts etc) and the upper
classes (the invading Romans, Normans etc. )
There are many polysyllabic words of Latin and Greek origin in English.
They are often technically precise and appropriate in context. However, the
idea that all Greek-derived words are polysyllabic monstrosities designed to
obfuscate or serve some political purpose is simply not true, and dropping
Greek-derived words from English texts, or limiting their use, is not a
practical idea. I give you a list of short, common, Greek words in English -
from allergy to horoscope (which starts with a rough-breathing omega):
allergy, amoral, anaesthetic, apathy, arctic, arithmetic, asthma, abyss,
agate, archangel, angle, anchorage, aerobics, athlete, academy, acme
[features in RoadRunner cartoons, along with Ajax, the Greek hero],
acoustic, guitar [through Spanish], alphabet, amygdala [heard on a science
program on television - Greek there too - recently], anorexia [but obesity
is Latin], .....
...organ, police, programmer, sarcasm, philosophy, telephone, system,
chaos, chiropractor, psychology, idea, cinema, drama, climax, coma,
dyspepsia, zone, catastrophe, nectar, hydrogen, electric,.....
...phenomena, pedophile [in newspapers a lot, a few years ago],
rhododendron, rheumatism, Mesopotamia [had a revival in the political press
recently], centre, calypso, idiot [very, very common in popular discourse!],
theory, paradox, geography, autopsy [amazingly frequent on television],
asylum...
The modern working classes use a lot of these words. If you refer to an
acoustic guitar, or an electric guitar, or asylum seekers, or complain that
someone doesn't know their alphabet, or go to water the rhododendrons, or
mention your mobile phone, you are using Greek. It's everywhere.
The words may well have originated in a literate class and filtered down
the social scale in some past era, but it would be hard for us to do without
these words today. I once came across a claim by a Greek philologist that
there are at least 40,000 Greek loan words in English. I have no way of
checking this, but considering the amount of Greek we use in everyday speech
and writing, I would not be surprised if the claim were true.
In the final analysis [yes, that's Greek too], the old rule applies: know
your audience, and use words that the audience will understand. It doesn't
matter where the words came from. Any attempt to limit your text to words
derived from only one of the historic strands of English is a pointless
exercise. It's all English now, whether it came from Anglo-Saxon, Latin,
Greek, Norman French, Dutch, Hindi, Chinese...
JH
