[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).