Hi! I just had a random linguistic question. I was thinking of terms like “alma mater” and graduation designations like “cum laude” etc. and even in academic writing we commonly have phrases like “ad hominem” or “ad nauseum”. Why have these terms persisted in English societies, and where did integration of them with academia come from?
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Idk why it started, but we keep it around probably because it sounds more official. “Hes got myocarditis” sounds much more official than “He’s got heart muscle swelling”. “Spatularis Rubra” is a much more official sounding name for a species than “the flat one that’s red”.
If you want a field of science that uses plain English, look at astronomy. They have telescopes pretty much called “The big one” and “The really big one”. What do they call big stars that are red? Red giants. What do they call small stars that are white? White dwarves. If it pulses, its a pulsar. If its magnetic, its a magnetar. Found this weird black thing that stuff falls into? Black hole.
Not every field uses latin/Greek conventions.
Every word we have in English comes from other languages, the only real difference with the words/phrases you’ve picked is that they continue in their original form and haven’t mutated somehow
Modern English isn’t a pure language (very few languages are) it’s a hodgepodge of Old English, Old Norse, Old French, Latin, Greek, and bunch of other languages. So while those examples have foreign language origins they are part of English. We haven’t come up with English words to replace them because they are part of English.
To add to what others have said, we sometimes use both and Latin root and the Germanic root when speaking in law. These are called [legal doublets.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet)
It wasn’t that long ago since you basically couldn’t get a higher education at all unless you were fluent in Latin, because bulk of the literature was not translated to local languages. It was so recent that even Einstein was told he would never amount to anything because he was no good at Latin.
You needed to be fluent in Latin and hopefully decent in Greek and/or Hebrew. It was only in end of 19th, start of 20th century that for nationalist reasons universities really started prioritizing local languages. And Latin certainly didn’t disappear overnight, it’s still not gone, there are still quite a lot of countries where Latin remains compulsory part of education. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_in_Latin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_in_Latin)
It started out as gatekeeping: when my ancestors couldn’t bully people for being poor any more, they bullied them for not speaking Latin. Also for ages all the science and law was in Latin: it was literally the *lingua franca*, the language of the Franks (mediaeval word for most of what we’d call Europeans today). Universities taught in Latin then for the same reason many courses have very significant elements in English today.
These days it’s aesthetics. *Mathematical Methods for Scientists* is my boring-ass textbook. *Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica* is this ancient and weighty tome by famous nerd Isaac Newton, and nobody mentions that’s the same title.
It’s also kind of a code: *brachistochrone* is a concept I’d need loads of words for if I didn’t have this handy Greek jargon. And it has happened to words we’re all familiar with too, like *telephone* and *helicopter*. Latin and Greek let us make up a posh sounding name for something right quick, and knowing them lets us decode someone else’s posh name too. For example, I am not a lawyer, but I know that *stare decisis* means that a decision of some sort is standing around.
It’s not perfect, but we genuinely need some kind of source of jargon, and using dead languages is better than using living ones and occasionally having foreign colleagues fall about laughing.
The reason we don’t invent new words from whole cloth to replace existing ones is that people are used to the existing ones. Imagine someone told you that from now on a telephone is a farspeaker. Would you start saying farspeaker or just roll your eyes and keep saying telephone or just phone?
Latin and Greek linguistics have a strong tradition in medicine and academia and serve as a ‘bypass’ of language barriers, at least within Western society. This is probably due to the tradition of teaching Latin in schools in Western society, but this means a French academic can share information with an American one to at least some extent.
English as the international language of science (lingua Franca lol) is a relatively modern development. Latin was it for the most part since most European educated philosophers were fluent. Then French became it for a long time with some German in there. So depending when the particular science peaked you might get more or less technical words in latin/french/german.
One of the defining features of the English language is its willingness to wholesale adopt foreign words and phrases quickly. Most of English Latin is of French origin, English and French has mixed culturally for so long that earlier versions of English that has less French in it is unintelligible to modern English speakers.
Talking, specifically, about Latin in the academic sense – Latin and German are / were lingua francas in academia for centuries. It is why we have words like zeitgeist and bildungsroman for sociology and art and why so many psychological terms are of German origin. Like, we use the word gestalt to describe some psychological phenomena.
English already doesn’t mind ingesting foreign words, instead of attempting to create an English version of every word the language has no problem just using foreign words and penciling them into the English dictionary.
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