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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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.
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.
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)
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)
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
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.
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