Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

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Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions, and you'll find bird-spotters and gardeners doing it too thanks to Carl Linné's / Carolus Linnæus's love of Latin.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French - "attorney", "culprit", "grand jury", "tort", "voir dire" and so on

I think what you're trying to say is that people who are pretentious and middle-class (who in your experience are affluent white Americans) like to reach for Latin words because they sound grander. Orwell had a lot to say on that in Politics and the English Language:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

> Pretentious diction [is] used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. [...] 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

> Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions

The fact that the language has such a degree lf these holdovers has something to do with Americans (or, rather the Anglosphere more generally), which is why the GP can note that it is a difference from German, where once upon a time; Germany had the same use of scientific, clerical, and professional Latin in the past, after all.

Well, perhaps we can congratulate the German-speaking countries for throwing off the yoke of Latin!

It did not happen in the Anglosphere because England was run by the Normans for hundreds of years, during which the common law system grew enormously...

Let's also not forget ecclesiastic Latin! Significantly less common in the HRE since Martin Luther's protestations!

Habeas corpus comes from English common law, not Roman law. It was never used in German law.

Latin terms are still used in German legal writing. Just not this one.

Also accounting!

In English: "assets and liabilities" (Old French derived). In continental languages: "actives and passives" (medieval Latin accounting vocabulary).

That's funny, in English "actives and passives" are videogaming terms!

>Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness.

My first thought was "it's especially strange to come out swinging against 'whiteness' in order to defend... native German language?"

Orwell said it better than I could, naturally. My point isn't that the professions can be traced back to origins in other languages. Nor do I mind a lingua franca for a scientific discipline. My gripe is that jargon, colloquial use and even common parlance haven't evolved away from it.

There could have been a movement away from old inherited terms. But there wasn't. And I have no better idea as to why than classism.

(German has a word for that! Jägerlatein, "hunter's latin", as a term for blowing up terminology to keep away the working population and restrict the game to the upper classes that are better educated, and frankly have a lot of time for that BS.)

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