(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)
To sum up, the courses, textbooks and additional
materials I've been involved in creating all represent an attempt to fill an
educational gap caused by three features of contemporary English. The first two have wide application to the
whole of the language, while the third feature is more specifically applicable
to academic English.
1) English is
unique among modern languages in suffering a disjunction between its concrete
vocabulary, which is largely native, and its abstract vocabulary, which is
almost entirely borrowed from Latin and Greek.
2) The tenuous connection between abstract vocabulary and
the concrete words upon which abstract ones are built, though maintained for
most of the nine hundred or so years that the problem has been with us by the
near-universal learning of Latin (at least at the level of education demanded
of readers and writers of "academic" material), has been broken in
the last two or three generations.
3) To some degree
at least, academics, like specialists in any area, are still more or less
conscious of the benefits which come from the possession of an arcane
vocabulary.
All three features contribute to the difficulties
contemporary native speakers of English have with all of their own language's
abstract and technical words, but they make academic vocabularies, because of
their heavy dependence on Latglish, even more difficult to learn than other
specialized vocabularies or jargons.
The first feature, at once the least understood and the
most far-reaching in its implications, is perhaps the most difficult to
grasp. A further set of examples of the
problem may help. English speakers are
on safe ground if we "grasp" a "point" during a discussion,
because both "grasp" and "point" are concrete words used
abstractly here but with clear connections of meaning to their concrete
denotations. If, on the other hand, we
"comprehend" an "idea" or "perceive" the
"argument," we are in a realm of abstraction without obvious
connection to tangible reality.
Let's consider only the verbs. When we "grasp" an idea, the
metaphorical extension of meaning from the physical act of "grasping"
an object is clear and appropriate; its clarity and appropriateness are further
helped by the existence of well-known cognate or parallel abstractions such as
"grapple with," "seize on," "take hold of" and
"come to grips with."
When we "comprehend," on the other hand, we may
be dimly aware that our action is related to that expressed by the word
"apprehend," but we have no way of knowing, without special training
in Latin or etymology, that both words derive from Latin "prehendo"
meaning "I grasp" or "I seize," and that we are therefore
using the same metaphorical extension of meaning as in the previous
example. Similarly, if we
"perceive," or "conceive," or understand a "concept,"
we are making use of a nearly identical metaphor ("-ceive-" and
"-cept-" derive from Latin "capio" meaning "I
seize" or "I take"), but again without being able to connect it
by meaning to a physical act denoted by a cognate word in the world of concrete
objects. The native speaker of Latin, to
put this another way, would not suffer the English speaker's disjunction
between abstract "comprehend," "apprehend" and
"conceive" on the one hand and the concrete act of physically
"grasping" or "seizing" on the other, because
"prehendo" and "capio" were used of that physical act as
well as in their metaphorically extended senses. Similarly, a contemporary German speaker would find no
disjunction between the abstract verb "begreifen" ("to
comprehend" or "to understand") and cognate concrete words like
"greifen" ("to grab" or "to grasp") and
"Griff" ("handle; thing grasped"). Finally, French "comprendre" ("to
comprehend") clearly derives, with no disjunction, from
"prendre" ("to take").
Thus native speakers of English are often handicapped, in
a way that speakers of the above-mentioned languages are not, if confronted
with an unfamiliar word from the same root as one we already know
("prehensile" may serve as an example in the present context) or even
by a word we do know if it is used in an unfamiliar way
("reprehensible," for example): since our language lacks a cognate
concrete word, or a use of the same root to denote something physical and real,
we have no image to refer back to in order to guess the meaning of a word or in
order to remember its meaning once learned.
We must rely upon context alone if we are to guess, and memory alone if
we are to remember. Even so, the lack of
a "root" and unifying concept can result in memory and context
seeming to run counter to one another, as in the following examples:
He comprehends the problem.
He apprehends the criminal.
He is apprehensive.
The book is comprehensive.
The action is reprehensible.
My second point, that the disjunction between English
abstract and concrete vocabulary has been worsened by the cessation of that
almost universal knowledge of latin that prevailed until very recently among
those who claim to be educated, need not be labored. It does however need to be pointed out. This is because the advantages of knowing
Latin in terms of the enhancement of one's understanding of English vocabulary
are, for most of those few people who do know Latin, unconscious ones, while
for those who do not know Latin those advantages are, by definition, not knowable
at all. Latin has dropped out of the
curriculum, almost silently; where a clamor has arisen, the vital problem of
disjunction between abstract and concrete vocabulary has not formed a large
part of the protest. This is not to
suggest that the resuscitation of Latin would in itself solve the problem: a
knowledge of Latin provides only the material from which connections may be
drawn between words in English, but does not in itself confer the ability to
explicate Latglish. In practice, the
only solution to this growing problem of communication--this gap, this
disjunction--is going to be specialized study of English etymology, of the kind
this blog is dedicated to fostering.
My final point, that academic vocabularies to a greater
extent than other jargons confer benefits of some kind upon their initiates,
may be disputed. But words do have
power, and always have had. Some, in
contemporary English, have so much power that few of us can bring ourselves
even to utter them, in "polite company" at least. Again, the idea in primitive magic that
learning the name of something gives one power over it may persist in what used
to be our fairly widespread reluctance to share our middle, or secret, names,
except with intimates.
So practitioners of academic specialities, knowing the
special names of things, may have in the eyes of many of the rest of us a kind
of power over the things themselves; in addition, in order for the special
names to be efficacious they must remain secret or arcane, the property of a
select few....or is it perhaps just that the Emperors' new clothes are no
clothes at all, and that in academia we sometimes find ourselves pretending
that we all--students and professors alike--really can see through to the
meanings inherent in the lovely Latglish we clothe ourselves in?
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