Comments on: Excuse me, but your past is showing: using etymology to peer back in time

By: Of Official English sillyness, painful grammatical errors, and cooked circles of Freedom-Flour : Notes from a Linguistic Mystic

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 19:22:07 +0000

[…] tall order, as forbidding any further borrowing of words from other languages is a bit ridiculous. As I’ve discussed before, English is ripe with borrowings from Spanish, French, Latin, Greek, and even […]

By: will

will — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 18:55:29 +0000

Dave,

Sadly, I’m not sure I’m qualified to discuss this particular issues, as word origins and latin/greek are more of a hobby than an area of distinct academic study for me. However, you raise some really fascinating questions, with these double-borrowings, and if I stumble across an answer somewhere, rest assured, I’ll post it up.

By: What do assassins and sofas have in common? English words with Arabic origins : Notes from a Linguistic Mystic

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:10:59 +0000

[…] - Orange, as I’ve discussed before, is derived from the Arabic […]

By: Dave Bath

Dave Bath — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:20:14 +0000

As usual, very interesting post. I’m interested in your opinion on the way technical (no real Germanic equivalent) Latin and Greek words/roots get used differently, even when they mean the same thing. My hunch is that the greek version will be used for the more noumenal, the equivalent latin word/root having more concrete overtones. e.g. albi/leuco, visi/skepsi, occ/opth-, fem/gyn, vir/andro, ped/pod, sap/soph, liber/biblio niger/melan or even full words like perambulatory/peripatetic, cerebral/kephalic

I’m assuming that Latin was fairly Hellenized by the time the Normans invaded England. (Another layer “down” door is concrete compared to a portal which might be non-physical)