(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.
A lot of the top set come from latin and/or french (sometimes borrowed from one into the other first). Lots of words around the legal system, government, nobility, etc. come from those roots. Many from the Norman conquest but some earlier. Some even got borrowed in twice (not french but both shirt and skirt are borrowings of the same word at different times).
A lot of diplomacy was also french be cause that was the language for diplomacy for a long time. For some sciences, it was German.
A lot of the more working-class, I guess, and later words follow the old Germanic patterns (the base of a lot of old English coming from Anglo-Saxon and, to a lesser degree, old Norse)
This is exactly it, and it has to do with the Norman Conquest. After 1066, French was the language of the
hurlingruling class and English was for commoners. As such, a lot of French words got borrowed into English, and they usually carried a higher status. Cow vs beef, deer vs venison, that kind of thing.IIRC it was around 10,000 French words that were introduced into English after that. That’s what we learned in school, anyway.
I forget the numbers I’ve heard, but that sounds right. It’s also important to remember that in the 11th century, English vocabulary was much smaller than it is today, so those 10,000 words were a much larger proportion of the English language than might be apparent.
Another thing to know is that English was heavily influenced by Old Norse prior to the Norman Conquest, too. The mixing of those three languages, each having some differences in grammar and inflection, ended with English dropping a lot of inflections and turning to word position in a sentence to determine what’s subject, object, verb.
English is most similar to Frisian, apparently.
https://knoji.com/article/frisian-the-language-thats-like-english/
Frisian: Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.
English: Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Fries.
From the little we know about Frisian, yes, very similar.