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> I don't understand the distinction you're describing in English. You give an example of "coal" and "stuff" and "carbon", but I don't understand why you're arg

> I don't understand the distinction you're describing in English. You give an example of "coal" and "stuff" and "carbon", but I don't understand why you're arguing that "carbon" belongs to a higher/academic register. Your examples seem to support the inverse of your argument, which is that German (and presumably other languages) has a distinction between a higher and lower register (one could choose between "Carbon" or "Coal-stuff") and English doesn't have this distinction (you must use "carbon" when talking about carbon and "coal" when talking about coal). Not the OP, but - in German and other similar languages, there is no equivalent to "carbon" as a term with a separate etymology. The word for carbon is "coalstuff" - it is the thing which coal is made out of. Similarly, oxygen is "acidstuff" - because it was originally believed to be the cause of chemical acidity. If English had developed as other Germanic languages did, it would also use these kinds of terms for the elements, as well as in other parts of science, academia, and formal speech. Compound terms, which form a large part of common language (e.g. motor-way, hand-bag, table-cloth) would also be used in technical, political, and legal language. Instead, the "high" part of English is derived from Latin and Greek. The English call it science, rather than "nature-wit-making", because of the use of Latin among early academics meant they already had the word "scientia" instead. Nobody felt the need to apply Germanic-style compounds in a realm where all the vocabulary already existed. This results in two registers in modern English - that for words which are used in common speech, which are distinctly Germanic-sounding, and use lots of compounds; and that for words which come from academic, scientific, or political speech, which are Latin- and Greek-sounding, and largely lack compounds. English speakers can mostly automatically use these registers to affect their communication: you can easily make something sound pompous with a lot of high-register Latin-based terminology, or alternatively make it sound plain and common with low-register Germanic compounds.

throwaway894345 6y ago
That clarifies the argument, but I'm still not sure I buy it. I do agree that there are words that convey more pomp and that those words tend to be derived from Latin and Greek (typically by way of French), but I don't know that the distribution is particularly bimodal. Off the cuff, I would think it's more likely that "pomp" of a word is derived from its distance from the core of the lexicon, because these rarer words indicate more education. The core of English is based on Old English and Old Norse, so naturally there are a lot of these words that seem pedestrian, but on the other extreme there are other words very recently borrowed into English (and thus at the periphery of our lexicon) that tend to convey a lot of pomp--typically these are from Latin or French or Greek, but sometimes even from other Germanic languages (e.g., schadenfreude, hygge, etc). To restate my point, the distribution appears gradual rather than bimodal.

throwaway894345 6y ago

That clarifies the argument, but I'm still not sure I buy it. I do agree that there are words that convey more pomp and that those words tend to be derived from Latin and Greek (typically by way of French), but I don't know that the distribution is particularly bimodal. Off the cuff, I would think it's more likely that "pomp" of a word is derived from its distance from the core of the lexicon, because these rarer words indicate more education. The core of English is based on Old English and Old Norse, so naturally there are a lot of these words that seem pedestrian, but on the other extreme there are other words very recently borrowed into English (and thus at the periphery of our lexicon) that tend to convey a lot of pomp--typically these are from Latin or French or Greek, but sometimes even from other Germanic languages (e.g., schadenfreude, hygge, etc). To restate my point, the distribution appears gradual rather than bimodal.