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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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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