2 Matching Annotations
- Jan 2025
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aeon.co aeon.co
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There were even writerly sorts who proposed native English replacements for those lofty Latinates, and it’s hard not to yearn for some of these: in place of crucified, fundamental, definition and conclusion, how about crossed, groundwrought, saywhat, and endsay?
It is fun to see adopted words broken down to simpler roots/compound words. As mentioned, crucified and fundamental are sufficiently English to me, so much so that crossed and groundwrought are comical. Instead of arboreal, we could use treedweller.
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Sometimes they seemed to want to stake the language with ‘We’re here, too’ signs, matching our native words with the equivalent ones from Norse, leaving doublets such as dike (them) and ditch (us), scatter (them) and shatter (us), and ship (us) vs skipper (Norse for ship was skip, and so skipper is ‘shipper’).
This also adds a further complexity to the language. As these could be viewed as redundancies, yet both forms of the word get frequent use. Which other words share a double from a different original language?
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