Comment by rolig, 2 months ago

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 01:13:26 +0000

Latin words and phrases have long been well integrated in the discourse of particular fields (especially law, medicine, and academic scholarship) but are not used all that much in vernacular English (off the top of my head, the only common Latin phrases I can think of are versus, vice versa, per se, ad hoc, ad infinitum and ad nauseum, but of course there are more). But as I said, these have been around for centuries and have a well-deserved place in the language. Whether you consider them "English" or not really depends on how you define English. For me, it's enough that a word is widely used and understood by native speakers and established writers.

The question of when a foreign borrowing becomes naturalized (i.e. when we stop putting it in italics or in quotation marks) is an interesting one. English is a very absorbent language and a hefty chunk of it is made of borrowings that no one really considers to be borrowings anymore (e.g. "flower" and "color"). The naturalization can happen pretty quickly, sometimes in just a few years (e.g. "junta" and "chic"), though some words never quite lose their foreignness (cf. "naïve" vs. "naïf" or "motive" vs. "motif" vs. "leitmotif").

Comment by Shevek, 2 months ago

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:29:51 +0000

Words like this and frisson make me wonder where exactly lies the line between English words and borrowed foreign words. Opinions?

Wordie: Seriatim: Comments

Comment by rolig, 2 months ago

Comment by Shevek, 2 months ago