Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwp | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed this article although I suspect its factual veracity (oops, err, truth).

For one thing LEOs don't say "individual" because they're romance language kowtowers but rather because it's an instance of the largest valid superclass of man/child/woman/girl/boy/teenager/infant/...

Similarly, it's not "Sir, please get out of the Porsche 911" but "Sir, please get out of the vehicle". "Vehicle" is factually correct whatever the beliefs of the other party ("this is not just a car!").

Perhaps I'm not smart enough to catch all of the nuances in the article. For example the very first sentence's "grandmother" is splendidly etymologically ambiguous (grossmutter/grandmere), is this intentional?

Similarly "smart" (allegedly dumb German word) is derived via German smerzan, Latin mordere, Greek smerdnos (according to my dictionary).

View on HN

Post author here.

You're right about "smart." There are other minor inaccuracies that other people pointed out. The origin of "fuck" isn't clear. Were the anglo-saxons actually enslaved? (I'd say yes. Serfdom/slavery, what's the differece?) I didn't write this thing like a researcher. I wrote it like a daytime applied linguist with a secret passion for his crazy-ass blog. I'll do a rigorous one if people actually want that.

I actually want that... but don't do extra work because I ask nicely -- I will gladly pay for an (e)book on this topic, if it was written at a "smart layman"'s level. I think its fascinating, but not career fascinating, if you know what I mean. I just want to read about these things and maybe be able to impress strangers with random facts that were well researched by some person who knows what he's talking about.

"Your Mother's Tongue: Book of European Invective" is an interesting book about the same subject.

I was entertained by the "individual" vs. "man" phrase:

the sort of guy

These sound like nice simple Anglo Saxon words, but:

"sort" – 1200–50; (noun) Middle English < Middle French sorte

"guy" – 1300–50; Middle English gye < Old French guie, a guide, derivative of guier to guide

You played with these words in several parts of the post, which made it all the more entertaining a read.

Hello!

I like the hypothesis, I'm sure there must be some research on this.

There is a writing style guide written by a well-known English author, Victorian era, that suggests using saxon over romance words for clarity. I feel this is valid (also more concise, more punchy (more consonants)). I thought it was Kipling but perhaps not... somebody help me out?

You might be thinking of George Orwell, "politics and the english language" (a bit after the victorian era)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langua...

Rule 5 states: Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Yes! Thank you. Exactly (was later than I thought).

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

"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..."

Was it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barnes ?

"For example, the word "photograph" (from Greek light+writing) would become "sun-print" (from Saxon). Other terms include "wortlore" (botany), "welkinfire" (meteor) and "nipperlings" (forceps)."

In Finland there is a government agency called Kielitoimisto ("Language bureau"), which has as its mission to keep the language pure from foreign influences. They've recently tuned it down, but I remember a lot of proposals from them in the 90s similar to the ones you listed

Comparably, the French have L'Académie Française. Stuffed to the roof with curmudgeons who reject all foreign influences -- even from other Francophonic countries.

There's cases where Swiss French (counting), Quebecois French (conjugation of many verbs) etc is more logical or more consistent, but the changes are rejected as foreign by the Académie.

le weekend, le sandwich, un parking, un smoking ...

Yes, loanwords too.

In France the equivalent is the Académie française. So in French a computer is an Ordinateur, whereas in a lot of other languages it's derived from the English word. A few random examples: German: Computer. Spanish: Computadora. Scots Gaelic: Coimpiutair.

Edit: Oops Jacques beat me too it.

Actually, in European Spanish, "Ordenador" is way more common than "Computadora" (as an example, the former has 5 million results on Google for .es sites, while the latter has only just over 270k).

Well, modern Hebrew is still like that, to a large extent.

It's about register: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)

A lot of comedy comes from using the "wrong" register for a given situation, and a lot of amusement for English speakers learning German comes from the fact that Germanic languages gave us our informal-register vocabulary (our formal vocabulary came from Greek and Latin by way of French).

(thus, for example, a science student giggles a bit at the seemingly-informal "Wasserstoff", sounding as it does like "water stuff", but doesn't bat an eye at "hydrogen", even though the Greek root words mean essentially the same thing)

>Similarly "smart" (allegedly dumb German word) is derived via German smerzan, Latin mordere, Greek smerdnos (according to my dictionary).

What exactly do you mean when you say "derived via German smerzan"? Smerzan and smart have the same origin in common West Germanic, whereas the other two have their origin in common PIE (along with Slavic 'Sm(e)rt' meaning 'death').

If what you meant to say is that the word is derived from Greek smerdnos (via Latin and German), then you're reading your dictionary wrong because those are simply etymologically related words.

This was indeed my interpretation. I read this (second clause) as a linear chronology:

"Old english smeortan; related to Old High German smerzan, Latin mordere to bite, Greek smerdnos terrible"

Thank you for the correction.

I don't think the validity of the policeman example should taint the "factual veracity" of the entire article. The sociolinguistic ramifications of the Norman invasion are well established and there are a great many examples of synonymous words with class-based connotations.

As for the specific policeman example, you are probably right to say that "individual" is used because it is a useful non-offensive abstraction for the various sub-classes of human, but policeman-speak is still well-known for being unnecessarily verbose (from our biased anti-latin perspective as English speakers). Perhaps a better example would be choosing to use verbs like "locate" rather than "find".

As I said in my first post this particular example seemed so stridently wrong that I thought I'd missed something, that there was a level of irony in the article that apparently doesn't exist.

> "locate" rather than "find"

As it happens... I disagree this example is any better. To locate is to "discover the position" of something; to find is to "meet with or discover by chance" (that's my emphasis, but both are primary definitions from Collins English).

Could be it's just hard to meaningfully extrapolate those class-based connotations forwards 1000 years in an enjoyable pop-sci article.

All of these synonyms have subtly different connotations. In most uses, however, “locate” and “find” (like the other pairs on the list) can be used interchangeably, and the main difference is which one sounds “fancier” (for instance, “I located my keys” instead of “I found my keys”). Often, multisyllabic french or latinate words are used instead of simpler Saxon words by speakers or writers who are trying, consciously or unconsciously, to sound important; almost as often, in aiming for sophistication they just sound awkward.

>policeman-speak is still well-known for being unnecessarily verbose

Policeman-speak is closer to lawyer-speak because police spend a lot of time writing reports that are subject to cross examination in court. Police and lawyers must communicate clearly (in legal-speak) despite any difference in class.

The fascinating thing is that while using the words "intelligent" und "smart" you will be well understood by anyone German you will have a very hard time finding anyone who knows what "smerzan" is supposed to mean.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com