Well also English speakers get used to using Latin/Greek vs Germanic roots for a high/low distinction and other languages don'thttps://twitter.com/pookleblinky/status/844659254376173569 …
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You're hurting my head. There's like 14 things wrong (linguistically) with what you've said.
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What's interesting to me is genre fiction doing this deliberately, to use elevated language to imply something is special without saying how
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Like how a "portal" is a door, and therefore languages primarily based on Latin don't have different words for "portal" and "door"
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I'll start with what's right - the Chinese word for animal has nothing to say about a cultural view of animals.
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Also, English having distinctions for food/animal is also not a cultural statement but an accident of linguistic history.
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But the cow/beef distinctions aren't "classical" (latin or greek) - it's from Normal French.
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also "cerebral" v "brain" are different words because they different connotations. A word's etymology is not its definition.
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Although English has a lot of Latin and French in it, the most common words are almost entirely Anglo-Saxon wordstock.
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Not coincidentally, the most common words are the words children learn first - hence the association with less sophistication
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There is probably also an echo of the social split of the Anglo Saxons v their Anglo Normal overlords.
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