[bhritchie]

It is interesting to notice that when people want to sound official or authoritative (in business documents, for example) they tend to lean more on long, latin-derived words rather than the plainer, earthier words of Germanic origin.

[FabHK]

That reminds me of what I think was a flaw in the computer-based adaptive GRE. "Adaptive" because it gives you harder questions when you're doing well, and easier ones when you're doing badly, thus allowing for the same measurement precision, if you will, with fewer questions.

My Spanish girl friend and I studied English vocabulary to prepare for the GRE, and took many old-fashioned paper based tests (non-adaptive) for practice, then later the actual (adaptive) one. Her result on the actual test was much worse than on the practice tests, by many standard deviations (only in the verbal section, not in the quantitative section).

Now, in English, the more difficult words are frequently the words of Latin origin (for example, "to lament" vs "to mourn"). However, those were often cognates of the equivalent Spanish words, thus easier for her. So, the hypothesis is that she got some questions wrong initially, and the algorithm decided to give her "easier" questions (with more Germanic words), which would be harder for her, though; while withholding the harder questions which she could have solved correctly.

Intriguingly, it might have gone the other way around (depending on whether you first got predominantly Germanic words, answered them wrong, and got even more of them, or first got predominantly Latinate words, answered them correctly, and got even more of them.)

Thus, if ETS tested the adaptive algorithm on native English speakers, the adaptive test might have lined up very well with the traditional test, validating it.

(Now we're coming to the intriguing part.) If they tested it also with Latinos/native Spanish speakers, it might well have been that the mean deviation (between adaptive and paper based result) was also very small, but the variance of the deviation larger: many large deviations to the upside, many large deviations to the downside.

I wonder whether that was ever researched in depth, and whether it could have been grounds for complaints (that members of some community had measurements that were "worse", but not in the sense of biased, but of "less precise", with more variance!)?

[funkaster]

> I wonder whether that was ever researched in depth

Yes, it was. My wife studied linguistics and she has an MSc in Education, she has tens of books on grading and evaluating English learners, and GRE is a test that has been studied extensively. I don't have any reference at hand (on my mobile) but feel free to search on any education-related journal: you'll find tons of sudies.

[jessaustin]

You're hypothesizing an additional axis of question variation, "Romance-Germanic", in addition to the well-known axis "difficulty". Do we have any reason other than this anecdote to believe this other axis actually exists for GRE? Why wouldn't easy Romance questions be sorted in with easy Germanic questions?

[geofft]

One reason to believe it (or more specifically, to believe the correlation between the Romance-Germanic axis and the difficulty axis is not zero) is that easier / more common vocabulary is often Germanic and harder / more literary vocabulary is often Romance, as a result of the origins of social classes and an intentional desire to use Romance words (or straight-up import Latin words) among those of higher learning / standing. That's the claim of several comments in this thread.

[hprotagonist]

Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers(1). ... It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Orwell (1946)

[abecedarius]

You can find lovely examples of this in The Lord of the Rings -- like the chapter "The Voice of Saruman" or how the language of the narrator modulates in describing Sam being tempted by the Ring versus his more down-to-earth thoughts. (IIRC. I don't have it handy to check.)

[hprotagonist]

LoTR gets way more complicated than this, but you're right. There are very localized changes in language and dialogue throughout the book, and they're all intentional.

Note that the Rohirrim alliterate, for example (they're saxons!), and the elves don't.

[gumby]

I assume that's a fossil of the Norman invasion (1066) the way ordinary animals (cow, pig/swine) get transformed into fancy Romance words (beef, pork) when placed on the table. These kinds of linguistic scars can last a long time.

[kragen]

There's that, but also, Latin was the language of science throughout Western Europe until the 18th or 19th century; Euler, for example, published his papers in Latin, and if you browse the Mathematical Genealogy Project, you can see the transition from writing dissertations in Latin to writing them in local languages like German and Italian.

Nowadays, English occupies a similar position in much of the world — if you study a scientific or engineering discipline in a non-English-speaking part of the world, chances are excellent that you will also have to study English in order to read the literature in the field. To take an example you've worked on yourself, GCC's comments are in English, and so is the mailing list.

So it's quite common for people to use English loanwords in, for example, Spanish when discussing computers, video games, and so on.

[gumby]

Yes I remember in France in the 80s you had to translate all the technical words (stack, buffer, etc) into French equivalents in order to publish, even though we used the English words in conversation, email etc.

I know Latin was the language of science (later German until the late 1910s) as French was in diplomacy, but the contemporary significance of the use of latinate words is more of an English thing IMHO -- certainly more than in romance countries like Spain! There are some use of latinate endings in loan words in German but technical jargon (e.g. legal language) tends to simply be complex German words.

I gave long found it odd that English went through a phase of using Latin or Greek roots to construct a new word (e.g. television) while most people use their own language (e.g. Fernseh). Or jarringly, combine the two (e.g. "monolingual" -- yech)

[barry-cotter]

The reason German, Polish, Russian etc. aren’t chock full of Latinisms, Hellenisms and even more French than is already the case is because of deliberate language reforms and coinings of “authentic, native” terms. Of the Germanic languages I believe Dutch is the only other national language to escape such reforms, which is why it, like English, still has many more loanwords than languages that didn’t go through this. Übersetzen is an obvious calque of traduction. I don’t know the geographic extent of it but French was the language of all upper class people over a huge portion of Europe for centuries, whether we're talking about the Russian nobility and haute bourgeoisie or the upper classes of all of what we would now call Belgium, not just those areas where they now speak French, or the Rhineland.

[azeotropic]

Television is the same kind of Greek-Latin hybrid as monolingual

[gumby]

Yes, I should not post while walking downtown. Thanks!

[Sharlin]

Funnily though, after Latin, German became the lingua franca (or should I say deutsche Zunge?) of natural sciences for a while, before English dethroned it in the second half of the 20th century.

[mrec]

That's an old and popular idea, but controversial in modern linguistics. See for example

http://anglisztika.uni-eger.hu/public/uploads/orsi-2015_576c...

which among other things points out that words like "beef" and "mutton" don't appear in English until centuries after the Conquest.

[marras]

In Polish, killing an animal changes its gender instead: you can butcher a pig (_świnia_, feminine in Polish) but get "hog-meat" (_wieprzowina_, from _wieprz_, masculine).

Same with a cow being turned into "ox-meat" (krowa -> wołowina) and sheep -> "ram-meat" (owca -> baranina).

[vertline3]

Makes sense, according to wikipedia

"Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, "

[tragomaskhalos]

In medicine Latin and especially Greek terms are still ubiquitous of course, to the point where a classical education must be a huge leg-up in learning the terminology. Eg: I once astounded my medical student neighbour in halls at Uni by correctly guessing what a 'salpingogram' was, despite never having seen that word before.

Similarly, for (modern) Greeks a lot of opaque medical jargon that baffles most of us must be more or less plain speaking to them.

[bhritchie]

And then using latinized words also makes normal things sound more technical or scientific than they really are. For example you can say "let's implement business process improvements" or you can say "let's do things better."

[microcolonel]

Was going to link the Monty Python skit about words being comparatively woody or tinny (in relation to "earthy" words), but the rights holder has erased it from the internet.

Added: Well at least the script is available

<http://www.montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_4/23.htm>

[microcolonel]

Side note: can't edit the link above, but due to an ARC bug from more than a decade ago[0], HN does not correctly delimit it at the ">" (because they escape it a second time, but don't escape the escapes I guess, which causes the ">" not to match as a closing delimiter for the URI).

[0]: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/03e329e9cec8ad456...