site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2898 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

  1. Why does English uses Latin adjectives for so many nouns? It it to sound smart or because it's fundamentally bad at making adjectives as a language?
  2. Where can I find a list of them paired with their nouns?

For example, there's doggy bags and catty behavior and foxy ladies, but everything else is canine and feline and vulpine. Everyting about the sea is marine, everything about the birth is natal, everything about the king is regal or royal, everything about a son is filial, everything about a god is divine.

It feels like another of these upper-class word games, like the collective nouns for animals. "Hawhaw, hearty illness, you say! No, only a meal can be hearty, real hearts are cardiac!"

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

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, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers...

I imagine this is some kind of long-standing remnant of the fact that the British royals used to exclusively speak French rather than English.

Because William the Bastard crossed the Channel and became William the Conqueror, then he gave land to all his friends so most of the English Upper class became French speakers. They were all Normans, ie French speaking Vikings. So English got an enormous new vocabulary spoken by it's new rulers and the language adopted the new upper class' words. Same reason why cows (Germanic root) provide beef (French/Latin root). The commoner natives raised cattle to produce meat the noble French speakers ate.

This is very common in Turkish. Language substrate of old Turkic, blended with a lot of Persian (anything literary), Arabic (anything religious), French (anything modern pre-1960s), English (anything modern post-1960s). There are usually multiple ways to say the same thing from each language and it gives the sentence a different vibe.

Latin was primarily associated with religion, diplomacy and academia, and only with aristocrats indirectly.

Large chunks of any language, including English, are really only used by a very small subgroup of speakers. This is especially true in an age before mass literacy. When intellectuals needed new poetic / technical terms, they would have reached for the language that they were used to using and would be easily understood by their correspondents abroad. I doubt they would have cared about excluding peasants, who were not literate and could not possibly be mistaken for one of them.

I think that class traps and an excess focus on manners became much more relevant as Britain got richer and the boundaries between the classes became more porous.

The History of English Podcast is a very excellent podcast about the development of the English language from Old English to the present day. The episode most relevant to your question is this one:

https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2021/04/28/episode-147-a-rude-and-rusty-language/

Full Transcript: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/HOE-Transcript-Episode147.pdf

Correct on the class games. What you're looking at is the remnant of linguistic layers in England: a Celtic native population conquered by Anglo Saxon Germanics who mostly achieved linguistic unity before being bulldozed by a French speaking upper class (whose descendants still disproportionately horde wealth and power today), with a parasite population of Latin speakers with significant influence.

The medieval church neither spoke Latin(Latin was a liturgical/scholastic language and not spoken) nor was more parasitic than the nobles were.

There is a separate trend of church-educated but themselves secular writers adopting Latinate spellings which made no sense- that’s where the b in debt and the p in receipt came from- but most Latin influence was either loan words from the Anglo-Saxon era(eg wine) or a loan word with a perfectly reasonable explanation for why it came from Latin. The bulk of English’s romance vocabulary is French in origin, not Latin.

The medieval church neither spoke Latin(Latin was a liturgical/scholastic language and not spoken) nor was more parasitic than the nobles were.

Latin was certainly capable of being used in communication between educated Europeans. Which was parasitic, in the sense that it was unnatural. There was no native population of latin speakers who grew up speaking latin because it is what they heard at home, everyone who learned latin had to be taught latin as a second language.

Nothing could be more natural than parasitism.

Maybe the church wasn't more parasitic than the nobles. That wasn't the claim.

The church was definitely parasitic. By the time of Henry VIII, the church owned an estimated 1/4rd to 1/3rd of the arable land in England.

Prebuttal: The instant temptation will be to reply that much of Britain's land today is owned by a few groups. Let's consider the differences. First, we're talking about arable land not just uninhabited Scottish scrubland or whatever. Secondly, this was a time when most real wealth was tied up in arable land. Agriculture represented more than half the economy as opposed to a tiny percentage today. Religious groups were hoarding a large amount of the country's wealth. Imagine if 1/3rd of the stock market, and 1/3rd of the real estate in every city center, etc.. was owned by the church. That's what it was like.

I've often thought about the dissolution of the monasteries and what a modern equivalent would be. The closest I've come up is a state seizure of college endowments or some sort of modern land reform (apartments converted to condos and renters given ownership and as well as the elimination of second home ownership).

I also think the lenses of the historical event should be weighed against how Henry VIII squandered the country and his personal financial position he inherited from his father and grandmother (both extraordinarily wealthy) on foreign wars court expenses.

I've often thought about the dissolution of the monasteries and what a modern equivalent would be. The closest I've come up is a state seizure of college endowments or some sort of modern land reform

In terms of the scale necessary, we'd probably have to go after Social Security. I can't think of anything else which would have a similar scale. In the U.S., all the university endowments combined only amount to $802 billion, but we spend $1.4 trillion on Social Security every year. Assuming an endowment spends 4% of its value per year, Social Security is 43 times larger than university endowments.

Even though Henry squandered the money he stole from the monasteries, the later absence of these wasteful institutions led to long term benefits for England. Certainly the countries that underwent the Reformation pulled ahead of those that remained Catholic.

Likewise, a modern society that stopped redistributing wealth to already rich elders and started investing in the young would reap large rewards. First step, a $100,000 annual tax deduction for each dependent child.

While social security coffers might match the scale, those are resources already utilized by the government. A key component is government seizure of wealth outside their control to use for their own ends.

For the effects of the Protestant revolution and country development I think that discussion is outside of the purview of a Small-questions thread. Most Catholic countries also went through some sort of Church wealth seizure at some point. I think the differences in country success is more a question of who had coal reserves.

$1.4 trillion on Social Security every year

Sounds like a lot, but that's just 4000 per person.

16,000 per family of four. Median household income is like 70,000. It’s gigantic.

Blackrock and Vanguard give a lot less back to society than the medieval church did, you know.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats