[pm215]

Also English in particular has a tendency to shorter nouns (often deriving from its Germanic roots) for simple, everyday words, plus more formal or precise synonyms derived from French or Latin which are longer. So there's a correlation between length and whether you have the 'plain' word or the 'formal, precise, intellectual' one. But that doesn't carry over to other languages inherently -- for instance in Japanese the 'plain' word is usually derived from old Japanese which is more multisyllabic, whereas the 'formal' word is the usually two-syllable Chinese loanword.

[fatbird]

Expanding on this point: English is a Germanic language with a vocabulary that's 80% Romantic (i.e., french, latin) in origin, due to the Roman and then Norman occupations of England (though the 20% that's Germanic makes up the most commonly used vocabulary). Because the ruling classes for several centuries spoke Latin or French, education became synonymous with those languages and English speakers borrowed heavily from them, leading to Germanic and Romantic versions of the same words ("pee" vs. "micturate", "shit" vs. "defecate") where the latter is the more formal, highbrow version of the former.

A similar transition is happening with Japanese, where English, the dominant world language in the 20th century and second language for many Japanese, is having its vocabulary widely adopted into the Japanese language. For example, the more common word for "ball" in Japanese is now "bōru" (literally, "ball" pronounced with Japanese syllables), while "tama" refers to more traditional items.

French, interestingly, is consciously hostile to borrowing vocabulary from other languages, to the point of having the Académie française in France [0] (and, to a lesser extent, the Office québécois de la langue française in Quebec [1]) act as "the authority" on the language, prohibiting borrowed words and issuing directives on correct usage and new vocabulary.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_de_...

[tsimionescu]

Just a note, but differences like 'pee' vs 'micturate' are common in all European languages at least, even the romance languages. The more formal words are often almost identical, derived from a cleaner Latin with fewer phonetic transformations than the more vulgar words.