Quote:
Originally Posted by Tarential
Consider, on the other hand, learning a mere 2-3k words of Latin. You are much more likely to learn the word for "gold" or "silver" or "fox" or other common terms in those few thousand words than you would be to stumble across "ferroelectric" (without being an engineer/physicist). At least, that is my very subjective opinion, using my own lack of knowledge of those three words as a judgment on their popularity of usage in English.
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Totally understood, Tarential. I fully acknowledge your point. I agree my "English/Latin" examples are a bit extreme, and/or not so commonly used. Yet, just as an exercise, (not very careful at that, just roughly) I took one of your paragraphs above, and put in red the English words that have a Latin derivation. (In blue, from Greek through Latin.) (Note:
ferro- and
electric as units are actually a lot more common.)
But what? Not even a 20%?
Then again, many common English words are directly from Latin, which is why, knowing that "dead" language may be very useful for anyone who deals with communication and languages...
Again, I agree with your viewpoint on the matter, just wanted to further illustrate the influence Latin had in English... (much like current English has a heavy influence in Spanish... what with cyber-talk-texting and many other facets of life...)
