On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 7:47 PM, jansymello <jansy@aetern.us> wrote:
Stan Kelly-Bootle:..."it’s a well-ploughed mine-field: English being both
enriched and bothered by so many Anglo-Saxon and Latinate synonyms. For diverse
historico-socio-linguistic reasons, the latter are associated with scientific
and religious scholarship, while the former are rated as less learned or even
downright crude... That the Anglo-Saxon plainspeak intimate body-part words are
indeed shorter (and often wrongly considered less euphonious) than the alien,
unEnglish imposed Latin “refinements” (ironically, the ink-horn terms are
always the least horny!) is a mixed blessing for poets and novelists...the
natural-native four-letter words for faeces, coitus, vagina and penis still
leave a nasty taste ...
JM: Forty years ago, in Rio (I don't know if it was
also practiced elsewhere) to speak good English meant avoiding most Latinate
terms and stick to the
Anglo-Saxon.We had to say
"wealthy", not "rich", "worried", not "preoccupied", "tired," not "fatigued,"
"hand-made,"not "manufactured"....
I hope you're joking! But as a teacher, I know teachers can make all kinds of mistakes. Just in case anybody picks up false impressions from Jansy's teachers, both "rich" and "wealthy" are from Anglo-Saxon, and "hand-made" is almost the opposite of "manufactured".
In line with what Stan says, English has many pairs of synonyms in which one is natural and the other can sound pretentious (Shade's two examples--"naked" and "nude", "sweat" and "perspiration"--as well as "buy" and "purchase", "storm" and "tempest", etc.), and in many of those the natural one is from Anglo-Saxon and the pretentious one is from Latin, often through French. But etymology isn't an infallible guide: for instance "rich" is more natural than "wealthy", and for most English speakers, "pigeon" is more natural for /Columba livia/ than "dove", although "pigeon" is from French and "dove" is from Anglo-Saxon. Anyway, a "foreign" word is often a "totally natural choice", even "perfect".
We also learned that in more
sophisticated environments, only (perhaps when, under Roman influence, all those
blond barbarians learned to eat cooked meat)
Another joke?
swine, i,e "pigs,"would be called
"pork."
When I started to
read Nabokov I was in for a big surprise,
Nabokov (like Shade) seems to have chosen words based on many
considerations that were at least as important as
naturalness to ordinary speakers and etymology.
but it was mittigated
by characters such as Humbert Humbert and Kinbote. Later I was ready
and anxious for more ( but I still bear a grudge against N's use of
"viatic").
...
Jerry Friedman isn't blond.