XPost: alt.usage.english, alt.language.latin   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   On Sat, 14 Sep 2024 22:58:09 +0100, Janet  wrote:   
      
   >In article ,   
   >ed@somewhere.in.the.uk says...   
      
   >> I can't help but wonder how to account for that, since, when Latin was   
   >> the lingua franca of European education, German scholars used it too.   
   >> But Germany had never become a Roman province; unlike Spain, France,   
   >> Britain.   
   >   
   >   Quite aside from Roman occupation,  Latin was the   
   >language of the  Catholic Church and many legal documents.   
      
   I don't think either of those had much influence on English.   
      
   The English arived in Britain after the Romans departed, and they   
   conquered the Romano-British, and so imposed their language rather   
   than adopting the language of those they had conquered (though their   
   cousins the Franks did the opposite when they conquered Gaul).   
      
   But when the Norman-French conquered England in the 11th century they   
   brought their laqnguage as the overlords, and it exerted a strong   
   influence on the English, so many Latin words came in via French.   
      
   And the Renaissance was another infuence, bringing in a lot of Greek   
   and Latin words, which had higher social status.   
      
   So four-letter Anglo-Saxon words were rude, crude, common, vulgar and   
   churlish, while much longer words derived from Greek and Latin were   
   refined, upper-class (at least until the middle-class started to   
   emulate the upper-class, when some of them became non-U).   
      
   So a refined and educated female had a uterus, while a churlish one   
   had a womb. A refined and educated male had a penis, while a peasant   
   yobbo had a cock.   
      
   One could make a long list of them:   
      
   shit		-- faeces   
   fuck		-- copulate   
   and so on.   
      
   It's one of the reasons why English has so many different words for   
   the same thing, with the Germanic ones having a lower class status   
   compared with the Greek/Latin/French ones.   
      
      
      
   --   
   Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa   
   Web:  http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm   
   Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com   
   E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)