What is the origin and why are latin/greek phrases so common in academic practices? Why haven’t we developed English words to replace these phrases?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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