Random memory

[pne]

I remember when I was in Greece as a missionary and a French or Italian missionary would ask me what a certain English word meant and I'd reply with a synonym—for example, I remember explaining "cliff" with "precipice".

The Americans wondered why I was explaning a simple word with a complicated one, and I was amused at that :).

The reason is, of course, simple: the "complicated" words have a Romance origin, so they're likely to have a cognate in French or Italian.

(For a similar reason, one of them told me that he had a much easier time remembering "injection" than "shot"; he also liked to use words such as "facilitate" which aren't that common in spoken English IMO.)

This would probably be the case even more for German, which has fewer Romance-derived words than English; Romance loans, therefore, tend to be even more "educated" than in English, where a Romance word is often the common expression. For example, someone talking in German about a "Possibilität" would sound high-brow or pretentious, whereas "possibility" is a "normal" word in English. (The usual German equivalent is "Möglichkeit", which might be translated into English as comething like "canliness".)

On the other hand, compounds from Germanic morphemes sometimes sound funny to me as well—for example, the Dutch "hoeveelheid" for "quantity" amuses me, since I'd understand it as "wieviel-heit", which makes sense but just sounds… quaint somehow because of its simplicity and transparent derivation. Perhaps like a word a child would create. (German wouldn't usually use "Quantität", though, but has a separate word: "Menge".)

Comments

[pthalo]

:) I do this too. Someone once wondered why I would use such a complicated word as "penultimate" (which most American's can't properly define; some of them might say it would mean "best" or "highest" or something like that) with an Italian speaker. The reason, of course, is that the word penultimato is used in every day Italian to mean "next to last"

[pne.livejournal.com]

Another nice example is "ameliorate".

I remember that from a session in the MTC in Provo where one day we had a teacher who was French. Her English was fairly good, but at one point she couldn't come up with a word so she "translated" from the French and asked the class whether "ameliorate" was an English word.

About half said "no" :p

[christine.livejournal.com]

I use faciliate all the time, but it's also part of my professional jargon as a Social Work student, so I suppose that's why.

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've made the same experience. When talking to a native Spanish speaker in English, I used the word "about", which he couldn't understand in that context. When I used "approximately" instead, he understood what I meant.

facilitate

[pne.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I was a bit wary about that word, as well—whether words of that "calibre" get used depends partly on the level of education of the people conversing.

I'd say it's not as "high-brow" a word as, say, "ameliorate", so it wouldn't be completely unusual, but for the 19-year-old "Average American", it probably wouldn't come up that often.

And, as you say, some areas have jargon words which are more common than the same word in general parlance; I imagine it's also commonly used in business contexts (the kind of people who use "synergy", for example).

Re: facilitate

[christine.livejournal.com]

!!!!!!!!111 I <3 "synergy"

It's my favorite word

synergy

[pne.livejournal.com]

I dislike it since, to me, it's a corporate buzzword thrown in to all sorts of things to sound important or to gloss over the fact that managers don't really know how merging two companies will have much measurable improvement.

In addition, a lot of managerese seems to be specifically to sound grand or to be vague (in the hopes that most listeners won't know exactly what they mean, since they don't either), when simpler words would convey meaning much better.

Re: synergy

[christine.livejournal.com]

Heh.. but it isn't only (or even primarily) a corporate word. I've heard it less in the the corporate context, and more in an interpersonal context. Again, this may be due to my professional choices, but I've only used synergy to mean the coming together of two people (i.e. social worker and client) or groups (agencies, community centers, what have you) to perform some task or provide a service that neither would be able to do alone.

I guess social workers just speak a slightly different language.

Re: synergy

[pne.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a good use of the word, to the best of my knowledge.

Yay people who use it in its intended meaning! I didn't know they existed. (But then, I've never had much to do with social work.)

[asciident]

Reminds me of a Spanish teacher I had for a while. She was natively Peruvian, and didn't know much English. She was attempting to tell a story to us (in English) and couldn't think of a word. Instead, she started pointing at her head and shouting "¡Cráneo, clase! ¡Cráneo! ¿Qué es?" Well, cráneo of course means cranium or skull, but she meant the more common, less technical word: head.