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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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Language is always evolving. A lot of “special” words are just lazy words that have fallen out of regular use over time, or have be pulled out of time and place to evoke the seeming of being old and authoritative. Sometimes "special” words or phrases are just memes used out of context, and sometimes the context is no longer relevant or it is forgotten. We have a “special” word for phases like that: Idioms. The rule for idioms is “Idioms mean what they mean”
Second point: the English language is heavily influenced by several historical processes
WARNING: I am not a linguist or historian and the following is greatly simplified, potentially to the point of falsityThe invasions of Germanic tribes: Angles & Saxons most notably, settled in what we now call England (Angle Land) and pushed the Celtic tribes west and north. Leaving mostly Germanic speaking peoples in the south and East.
The Vikings raids: another wave of Germanic speaking peoples raided and eventually settled in parts of the island, while no less violent than the earlier invasions, it did result in more intermingling of the local Germanic and the Norse Germanic languages than the previous Germanic/Celtic languages did.
The Norman Conquest: This invasion was more of a top-down invasion, where a French speaking monarchy replaced the English speaking monarchy. For a time French became the language of esteem, and state business was conducted in French, while outside the aristocracy, the common folk would use common English in their day-to-day. This is why a lot of modern legal and technical words, like litigate, defendant and plaintiff, have roots through French while rude words (“vulgar” comes from the Latin for “common”) often have Germanic roots. See: penis/vagina/intercourse vs. dick/cunt/fuck
Colonization and globalization: English speakers went out and invaded a lot of places. In addition to extracting resources, wealth and slaves from those places, they took a lot of words too, and just kinda squished them into the language where they could fit. Colonizers also forced English upon the invaded territories much like the Norman’s forced French upon England. Now you have many more English speakers in the world who are also have fusing their own languages into local dialects of English and English words into their native languages. All this gets mixed up into an era of global trade, travel and communication, and some words just get caught up in the global zeitgeist and make their way into common English usage.
Also, the Church and Romans are mixed up in there somewhere, but I have forgotten how.
Re: #6 prior to the invasions of the Angles/Saxons England was invaded by the Romans and a number of cities sprung up in the south populated by latin-speaking peoples. When Western Rome collapsed, the state capacity needed to maintain large urban centers went with it. The Roman inhabitants didn’t leave, though, but instead mixed with the local culture and the language dispersed into the general population of England.
At the same time the only thing left of Western Rome’s larger institutions was the Church, whose organization was inherited from Roman civic structures and who were the ones preserving written knowledge, which would be written in Latin.