> These scientific words, like hydrogen, oxygen, and many others, are very important since they filled lexical gaps that English had. English is known for its r

> These scientific words, like hydrogen, oxygen, and many others, are very important since they filled lexical gaps that English had. English is known for its robbery from the lexicons of other languages, but this is not a bad thing. Loanwords improve the precision of speech by providing more options to say one thing by filling lexical gaps. This gives me the feeling of getting things “standardly backwards”, just like semiconductors described in terms of negatively charged, positive-mass electrons moving in one direction rather than positive-charge negative-mass ‘holes’ moving in the opposite direction. It’s not that English lacked words for these concepts and that it imported them integrally meanings et al. That isn’t what’s happening at all. New concepts are arising as our scientific understanding expands. As a consequence, a vacancy in the lexicon is needed to succinctly and unambiguously address these new concepts. Loan words are a very convenient manner of getting these new ‘labels’ we need: they’re not already present in our language so they do not risk causing ambiguity, and by the same token probably have less ancillary baggage and implications involved. Foreign words are thus phonetically stolen wholesale but conceptually are probably quite warped, or at least made far more precise and specific than they are for speakers of the language from which the word was ‘borrowed’ (just as in English itself, vague terms such as ‘mass’, ‘work’, and ‘force’ were given very precise technical meanings to enable succinct but accurate conversation).