[inkyoto]

In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? The usual answer I hear is that it’s because it makes the language more beautiful and precise. I think it makes it inflexible and inconvenient in the same way that it’s easier to have 26 letters combined in arbitrary patterns than 5000 kanji that each represent one or more things.

You have to thank the British and the social class system they have invented. A person who can exacerbate a matter by virtue of defenestrating something (or someone) is at least of the middle class social status, and by listening to their speech accent in person, you will also be able to reason about how posh was the school they – naturally – attended (low class people went to a school but did not attend it). «Exacerbate» vs «make worse», «defenestrate» vs «throw out of the window», «attend a school» vs «go to a school» are examples of social register words that are specific to a particular social status of the person or a social group they belong to. Middle to upper class people tend to use more words of French and Latin origin to stand themselves apart from people of a lower social class who tend to use more words of the Anglo-Saxon / Germanic origin.

Social register embedded at the language vocabulary level is not unqiue to English (for instance, Korean, Thai, other SE Asian and some native North/South American languages also have multiple registers that require switching to the most appropriate vocabulary depending of how old, how regal, how well known etc the receiver of the speech is), but the clear indication of socioeconomic background is likely a rather unique trait of the English language.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Bah, we have this in Greek also. How "cultured" one is can be seen in their speech. In Greek it's not speaking with big words ("exacerbate" vs. "make worse") but how many old Greek words one uses. For instance, pretentious twats that fancy themselves to be educated above the common folk will use words that sound like something Solon would have said to his slaves or Konstantine II to his horse.

Then there's the matter of diacritics. Hellenistic Greek used to have a panoply of diacritics, of two kinds, one kind to change the pitch of vowels and one to indicate a soft or hard sound (occasionally used on consontants, particularly rho, ρ). These could even be combined together to make Greek text something that looked a little like a vim regex. With time, Greek pronounciation lost its pitch accent and the diacritics became irrelevant to spoken Greek. Yet they were kept on in written text until the early 1980's when they were finally abolished from the school curriculum so most people today don't know how to use those. Unless of course they make a point of writing in the "polytonic" system that includes the diacritics, which they will invariably tell you is because "that's more correct". In truth, it's not more correct, it's anachronistic and archaic, but it marks the person out as someone who is e r u d i t e.

So it's not just English, sorry to say. In fact it's easier to see how you'd have classism in the UK, which is, after all, a United Kingdom, with a monarch and hereditary (?) lords and all. In a place like Greece it's harder to justify because there everyone is basically middle class, with small variations- and we booted our last king out in the 1970's. So here it's even more pathetic when people put on airs. In the UK it's more a political thing, they're trying to put you in your place. But in the UK, it's not the language that's the problem, it's that society is rigidly stratified and language is only the symptom of the awful inequalities.

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[1] Wikipedia has the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_diacritics

[dragonwriter]

> In Greek it's not speaking with big words ("exacerbate" vs. "make worse") but how many old Greek words one uses

To be fair, in English it's not really “big words”, either, it's also old (but not particularly English; Greek, Latin, and French are pretty high on the list.)

Exacerbation (from which exacerbate is a back formation) is a fairly direct import from Latin. Defenestration was from (IIRC, at the time—and this was 400 years ago—already archaic) French. sic, which is definitely not a big word, is often perceived this way, again a Latin import. &c.

[orthoxerox]

Some write "coöperate" in English, which looks like the same kind of pretentiousness.

[fader]

I'd argue that it's less pretentious and more helpful to non-native speakers, as it indicates pronunciation. It's a marker that the word is pronounced "co-op-er-ate" and not "coop-er-ate". The diaeresis works much like vowel markers in Hebrew to make the words easier to pronounce for people reading a word they might not have heard pronounced.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

[onemiketwelve]

So why don't they just leave the dashes in, you know, like co-operate? I think a dash is much easier understood than an umlaut. Especially for native speakers

[euroderf]

AFAIK it's only The New Yorker that does that. They have their own standards I guess.

[anticensor]

> Unless of course they make a point of writing in the "polytonic" system that includes the diacritics, which they will invariably tell you is because "that's more correct". In truth, it's not more correct, it's anachronistic and archaic, but it marks the person out as someone who is e r u d i t e.

Indeed, Greek language definitely needs a spelling reform.

[goodcanadian]

To be fair, once upon a time, England was full of English people. The educated would know Latin as that was the language of the church and of international correspondence. Then, the Normans arrived and the upper classes rapidly became somewhat French. So, the difference in speech between upper class and commoner as well as between educated and less educated (England had remarkably high literacy rates even among the commoners) has a strong historical basis. I also haven't even mentioned the influence of Danish (Viking) on the language. I would guess that part of the richness of the vocabulary is down to the fact that English is an amalgamation of several languages.

[inkyoto]

It is deeply rooted in history, indeed; however, the British class system is a much more recent invention, and came along to become solidified with an onset of the industrial revolution, if I am not mistaken. The social divide had become so stark that good education became a privilege of middle and upper classes. Commoners could no longer afford paying for their education, hence they had no way of learning «fancy» Latin and «Greecian» words.

As for the Old Norse influence on English, I believe it is still a thing in Orkney Islands and in the local dialect locals speak. Danes at the time, when they took a questionable joy of raiding and pillaging villages and towns across British Isles spoke, essentially, the Old Norse