(non-native speaker)
Is there a reason why the English language has “special” words for a specific topic, like related to court (plaintiff, defendant, warrant, litigation), elections/voting (snap election, casting a ballot)?
And in other cases seems lazy, like firefighter, firetruck, homelessness (my favorite), mother-in-law, newspaper.
Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat? A lot of the law related words are from French derivations AFAIK?
Domain specific language is found across all realms of society, even firefighters have words or phrases with a specific meaning (back-burning, pumper, appliance, etc). So maybe its not that some areas are lazy, its just that you haven’t been exposed to their more technical side?
Law terminology specifically can seem pretty archaic because there’s a high need for terms to be stable over time. In other fields and everyday speech terms can change over time. There’s contracts signed decades or even centuries ago that are still binding today. So it’s practical in a sense if the words within and those used to discuss legal dealings don’t change over time.
All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.
What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.
For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:
- compounding - pick old word, add a new root, the meaning is combined. Like “firetruck” - a “truck” to deal with “fire”. You can do it recursively, and talk for example about the “firetruck tire” (the space is simply an orthographic convention). Or even the “firetruck tire rubber quality”.
- affixation - you get some old word and add another non-root morpheme. Like “home” → “homeless” (no home) → “homelessness” (the state of not having a home).
The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).
Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.
Most often the “fancier” words are loanwords from other language. Plaintiff/Defendant are from the French “pleintif/defendant”, litigation is from Latin. Firefighter, firetruck, and other compound words were created relatively recently compared to the others. Firefighters, firetrucks and newspapers mostly didn’t exist until after English mixed with other languages.
Also, the number of loanwords in English is completely absurd. Some other languages resisted borrowing/stealing special terminology from other languages by coming to with their own clever new words.
For example, entrepreneur is a clear loan from French where a salesman is a simple and clear description of a man who sells something. If you don’t know French, you’ll have no idea what the word entrepreneur means, but if you know basic English, salesman should be crystal clear to you.
Many other languages developed lots of these types of clear words in order to make communication easier and less elitist. English is completely wild and there’s no central authority that could reasonably give any recommendations that anyone would listen. This sorts of uncontrolled wild growth and stealing has been going on for centuries, and now we’ve ended up with a complete train wreck of a language.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Wait until you hear about the history behind how spelling and pronunciation became the disaster we have today.
A lot of them haven’t changed much in the last few centuries either. Law is a pretty arcane thing. I also suspect they don’t want most people to understand it too well. If the legal system is a confusing, overcomplicated, bureaucratic nightmare, then the lawyers will always have job security and charge stupidly high rates for their work.
Language is always evolving. A lot of “special” words are just lazy words that have fallen out of regular use over time, or have be pulled out of time and place to evoke the seeming of being old and authoritative. Sometimes "special” words or phrases are just memes used out of context, and sometimes the context is no longer relevant or it is forgotten. We have a “special” word for phases like that: Idioms. The rule for idioms is “Idioms mean what they mean”
Second point: the English language is heavily influenced by several historical processes
WARNING: I am not a linguist or historian and the following is greatly simplified, potentially to the point of falsity
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The invasions of Germanic tribes: Angles & Saxons most notably, settled in what we now call England (Angle Land) and pushed the Celtic tribes west and north. Leaving mostly Germanic speaking peoples in the south and East.
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The Vikings raids: another wave of Germanic speaking peoples raided and eventually settled in parts of the island, while no less violent than the earlier invasions, it did result in more intermingling of the local Germanic and the Norse Germanic languages than the previous Germanic/Celtic languages did.
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The Norman Conquest: This invasion was more of a top-down invasion, where a French speaking monarchy replaced the English speaking monarchy. For a time French became the language of esteem, and state business was conducted in French, while outside the aristocracy, the common folk would use common English in their day-to-day. This is why a lot of modern legal and technical words, like litigate, defendant and plaintiff, have roots through French while rude words (“vulgar” comes from the Latin for “common”) often have Germanic roots. See: penis/vagina/intercourse vs. dick/cunt/fuck
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Colonization and globalization: English speakers went out and invaded a lot of places. In addition to extracting resources, wealth and slaves from those places, they took a lot of words too, and just kinda squished them into the language where they could fit. Colonizers also forced English upon the invaded territories much like the Norman’s forced French upon England. Now you have many more English speakers in the world who are also have fusing their own languages into local dialects of English and English words into their native languages. All this gets mixed up into an era of global trade, travel and communication, and some words just get caught up in the global zeitgeist and make their way into common English usage.
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Also, the Church and Romans are mixed up in there somewhere, but I have forgotten how.
Re: #6 prior to the invasions of the Angles/Saxons England was invaded by the Romans and a number of cities sprung up in the south populated by latin-speaking peoples. When Western Rome collapsed, the state capacity needed to maintain large urban centers went with it. The Roman inhabitants didn’t leave, though, but instead mixed with the local culture and the language dispersed into the general population of England.
At the same time the only thing left of Western Rome’s larger institutions was the Church, whose organization was inherited from Roman civic structures and who were the ones preserving written knowledge, which would be written in Latin.
In general, specialized disciplines (like law, medicine, science, etc.) tend to also use specialized words. I don’t think English is unique in that regard, other languages do this as well.
