I'm not actually sure if this or The Sciences is a more appropriate place to put this thrad, but the question I have is largely historical in scope, so I'll put it here. And since I've had linguistics questions before (e.g., the
correlation between Wasilla's accent and Minnesota/Fargo's), and I'm sure I'll have additional ones in the future, I'm making it general rather than specific to my question.
Anyhow, for rather esoteric reasons*, I've gotten sucked into a vortex of looking up the etymologies of English words, and I've noticed an increasingly ubiquitous pattern: longer words seem much likelier to have Greek or Latin etymologies than shorter ones (
etymology: from Old French
ethimologie, from Latin
etymologia, from ancient Greek
ἐτυμολογία, from
ἔτυμον [
étumon, "true sense"] and
-λογία [
-logía, "study of", from
λόγος {lógos, “word; explanation”}];
ubiquitous: from Latin
ubique ["everywhere"], from
ubi ["where"];
esoteric: from Ancient Greek
ἐσωτερικός [
esōterikós, "belonging to an inner circle"], from
ἐσωτέρω [
esōtérō, "further inside"], comparative of
ἔσω [
ésō, "within"], from
ἐς (
es),
εἰς [
eis, "into"]). Most of the one-syllable English words I've looked up have had Germanic origins of some sort, while almost all the three-syllable-and-above words have had either Greek or Latin roots.
But I haven't looked up nearly enough words to determine whether my sample was close enough to random to indicate a legitimate pattern, and even if I were to look up a thousand words (which I don't have time/patience to do), I still couldn't be sure that I'd examined a truly random sample. So naturally, I looked for existing scholarship.
To that end, I've tried a number of web searches, and none of them returned results that look relevant. I honestly don't know where look, either. I've tried several different phrasings in Google's general and academic searches. The problem is that every phrasing I can think of contains words that could be used in several different questions, and the web searches I've tried have all returned results addressing those other questions.
As a result, I'm trying what's probably a more reliable approach: asking a forum that contains actual linguistic experts (e.g., erimir).
Is there a correlation between English word length and linguistic origin? Purely beyond the searches I've run, writing advice that's stuck in my head leads me to suspect there is. Orwell advised, in "Politics and the English Language", to avoid using too many words of foreign (especially Greek or Latin) origin, and also, "Never use a long word when a short word will do".** (Similarly, Churchill advised: "Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.") If my hypothesis is correct, then these two seemingly different pieces of advice are actually metonymically saying the same thing (
metonymy: from Late Latin
metonymia, from Ancient Greek
μετονομασία (
metonomasía, "change of name"], from
μετά [
metá, "other"] +
ὄνομα [
ónoma, "name"];
hypothesis: from Middle French
hypothese, from Late Latin
hypothesis, from Ancient Greek
ὑπόθεσις [
hupóthesis, "base, basis of an argument, supposition"], literally "a placing under", itself from
ὑποτίθημι [
hupotíthēmi, "I set before, suggest"], from
ὑπό [
hupó, "below"] +
τίθημι [
títhēmi, "I put, place"]).
Thanks in advance for any response.
*On the off chance anyone cares, the exact cause was that I began putting songs and albums with Greek titles that had been rendered in Latin script back into Greek script. (I don't recall for certain why I developed this obsession; perhaps it was the release of Blut aus Nord's
Deus salutis meæ [Blut aus Nord: grammatically unusual German for "Blood from/of the North";
Deus salutis meæ: Latin for "God of My Salvation"], which has three Greek titles in Greek script and two in Latin script.*** I'm almost certain the band did this because the three in Greek script are interludes and the others are full-length songs, but that was probably when I began converting other Greek titles to the Greek alphabet.) This led me down a particularly deep rabbit hole when I realised how many song, album, and band names I need to change over if I want to be consistent - for instance, Genesis (Γένεσις) and Arcturus (Ἀρκτοῦρος). In doing so, I've begun realising how many words we use in English actually have Greek origins.
I'm currently grappling with how deep I want to take this project. Thus far, the standard I've used is that if a title uses solely Greek words/names, I'll change it to Greek script, but if it also uses non-Greek words (e.g., "Thorns of Charon"), I'll leave it intact. I've also extended this project to loanwords from languages that use Cyrillic script, though there aren't as many of these (though, since I listen to several Ukrainian bands, there are still more than you might expect). Hebrew, Arabic, and possibly even Hindi words may eventually follow, but amongst my portable players, only my Galaxy actually supports these alphabets. I'm also only doing this for my portable players; for the lossless files on my computer, which is linked to my last.fm profile, I've left the original titles intact.
This isn't a perfect standard; two of At the Drive-In's titles have provided an edge case to test its limits. "Alpha Centauri" is entirely of Greek origin, but it looks rather silly in Greek script unless I actually
spell out "alpha", which still looks somewhat silly. The second song is "Proxima Centauri", and "Proxima" is of Latin origin, so using my current standard, that one wouldn't get converted over to Greek script. That would leave the two "Centauri" tracks in different scripts, which would
also look silly. I'm leaning towards making an exception for these and leaving them both intact.
**These are probably the two pieces of writing advice in Orwell's timeless essay that I've been
very bad at following. (He also recommends never using metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech you're used to seeing in print; while I avoid employing these, I still do so occasionally: see "rabbit hole" above.) By contrast, probably over half of my revision process consists of following another of his recommendations, "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out." Apart from edit notes (which may not be particularly reliable since I sometimes notice and fix typos hours after I stop working on a post), it should be possible to determine which posts I've revised here by their relative verbosity or concision: the more ideas I express in fewer words, the longer I probably spent revising it.
***In fact, every single title on the album seems to be of foreign origin. The Greek titles are "Δημιουργός" (Dēmiourgós, meaning creator), "Γνῶσις" (Gnôsis, meaning knowledge), "Apostasis" (Απόστασης, meaning distance, length, or duration), and "Ἡσυχασμός" (Hesychasmos, meaning quietism), and "Métanoïa" (Μετᾰ́νοιᾰ, meaning repentance, though this word is also used in English minus the accents). "Chorea macchabeorum" is apparently a Latin title meaning either "Dance of the Maccabees" or "Dance of Death", but the grammar confounds me. "Impius" and "Revelatio" are self-explanatory Latin terms and "Ex tenebrae lucis" is also Latin meaning "Out of Darkness, Light". "Abisme" is Old French for "abyss" (also Catalan, Basque, and a few other Romance languages, but given that the band is French, they probably intended it as Old French).
Linguistic miscellany
Threaded Mode
