(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2017; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)
So why "Latglish?" Partly out of frustration. It is difficult to find useful terminology
when discussing the fact that contemporary English vocabulary is riddled with
polysyllabic words which are not native to our branch of the Germanic languages
and which are made up of word-parts (morphemes) some (but not necessarily all)
of which were once word-parts in Latin (although some of those began life in
ancient Greek, and others were snatched into English from languages like French
which developed out of Classical Latin).
To put this more technically, English is a Germanic
language, sharing near ancestry with German, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish
(among others); it is also an Indo-European language, sharing remote ancestry
with (among many others) both Latin and Greek, and it is therefore even more
distantly connected to the Latin-derived Romance languages (most importantly
for our purposes, French, Spanish and Italian).
But despite this, an actual word count reveals that once you get past
the most commonly used 3 or 4 thousand words in English, about 60% of the
remaining 100 thousand or so words (estimates of the total vary) contain at
least one (usually more than one) morpheme (or "meaningful
word-part") which was at one time or another a Latin (or Greco-Latin)
word-part. What to call these words?
Latin? But they are not. Latinate?
Better, but a bit vague.
Rather than calling them something like, "English
words made up of one or more parts which have been borrowed from Latin or
Romance (some of which may have been earlier borrowed from Greek), and to which
non-Latin (mostly Germanic) word-parts and patterns of combination either have
been or may be applied," let's just say "Latglish" (a blend of
one Latinate--not Latin!--word, and one English one)--it's shorter.
For illustrations of some of the problems we are trying
to deal with here, consider the following statements:
I think therefore I live.
cogito
ergo vivo.
The first is
"English" not only in the sense that all the words in it are native
to our language but also because all the morphemes in it (including
"there" and "fore") are native; the second sentence is
called "Latin" for the same reasons.
But "ergo" is also an English word, a rare type, borrowed
whole without even phonetic modification; it could therefore be called "a
Latin word borrowed into English."
English "cogit-at-e" and
"cogit-at-ion" on the other hand clearly contain Latinate parts (the
morphemes cogit-, -at- and -ion-; the fact that cogit-
itself breaks into co-, an allomorph
of the Latin prefix cum-, -g-, an allomorph of the verb ag-ere, and -it-, an allomorph of -at-
doesn't even have to slow us down). So
"cogit-at-ion" could be called "Latinate," rather than
"Latin," given that the word in that form never existed in Latin. But the -e
of "cogit-at-e" had no place in Latin at all--should we then call
this word "Latinate-oid?"
Similarly, even though "viv-id",
"re-viv-e" and "con-viv-ial-ity" contain a Latinate
morpheme (meaning "live"), they all end in non-Latin ways, while
"viv-if-ic-at-ion," "viv-i-sect-ion" and
"sur-viv-al-ist" would puzzle Caesar and Cicero even though most of
the parts are Latinate (-ist however
comes from Greek), because the parts involved were never used in those
particular combinations in Latin.
"Vit-amin," "vict-ual-s" (with its derivative
"vitt-el-s") "re-vit-al-iz-at-ion-al-ism," and
"vit-al-ity," although they each contain versions of -vit- (itself an allomorph of -viv-), provoke similar difficulties.
To oversimplify in the interests of driving some of these
points home, one of the ironies is that one of the few ways you cannot write
Latglish "cogitation" in Latin is "cogitation"--the
permissible Latin forms, which depend upon the word's context, are
"cogitatio, cogitationis, cogitationi, cogitationem, cogitatione,"
and in the plural "cogitationes, cogitationum" and
"cogitationibus."
"Vivid" is even worse, appearing in Latin as "vividus,
vivida, vividum, vivide, vivido, vividi, vividae, vividam, vividorum,
vividarum, vividis, vividos and vividas" but not ever as plain ordinary
"vivid."
Nor would the sounds we make when saying Latglish out
loud be familiar to the gentlemen who called each other--to spell their names
quasi-phonetically--Kikero and Kaesar (the Germans got the pronunciation of
Kaiser right when they borrowed Caesar's name as a title). To take only the easier of the two sets of
examples above, all of the words we pronounce with the "v" sound
were, for the Romans, "w" sounds: Iulius Kaesar did not say
"veni, vidi, vici"--although that is what he wrote; what he said was
something like "wanee, weedee, weekee." The Latglish words "vivid" and
"convivival" are thus very different from the Latin word parts
pronounced "wiwid-" and "conwiwial-."
To illustrate just one further complication let's look at
some Latglish words derived from Latinate versions of the classical morpheme
meaning "tooth." Along with
Latinate-ish "dent-ist-ry" (one Latin, one Greek, and one Germanic
morpheme), we have in English "peri-odont-ic-s" in which the second
of two Greek morphemes is cognate with Latinate -dent- (and with English tooth!),
while -ic- occurs in both Greek and
Latin, and -s is the regular English
plural, but used here either as a translation or an analogue of Latin and Greek
plural morphemes; and in the name of the flower or weed called
"tooth-of-lion," dan- comes
from a French version of Latin dent-. Speaking of metaphor (which we haven't even
begun to, yet), you can probably see by now why the first word of this
paragraph is said to be "in-dent-ed!"
-
o -
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