5. Retell the text. Words and their ways in English speech

In every cultivated language there are two great classes of words which, taken together, comprise the whole vocabulary. First, there are those words with which we become acquainted in ordinary conversation, – which we learn, that is to say, from the members of our own family and from our familiar associates, and which we should know and use even if we could not read or write. They concern the common things of life, and are the stock in trade of all who speak the language. Such words may be called ‘popular’, since they belong to the people at large and are not the exclusive possession of a limited class.

On the other hand, our language includes a multitude of words which are comparatively seldom used in ordinary conversation. Their meanings are known to every educated person, but there is little occasion to employ them at home or in the market place. Our first acquaintance with them comes not from our mother’s lips or from the talk of our schoolmates, but from books that we read, lectures that we hear, or the more formal conversation of highly educated speakers, who are discussing some particular topic in a style appropriately elevated above the habitual level of every day life. Such words are called ‘learned’, and the distinction between them and ‘popular’ words is of great importance to a right understanding of the linguistic process.

The terms ‘popular’ and ‘learned’, as applied to words, are not absolute definitions. No two persons have the same stock of words, and the same word may be ‘popular’ in one man’s vocabulary and ‘learned’ in another’s. When we call a word ‘popular, we do not mean that it is a favourite word, but simply that it belongs to the people as a whole, – that is, it is everybody’s word, not the possession of a limited number. When we call a word ‘learned’, we do not mean that it is used by scholars alone, but simply that its presence in the English vocabulary is due to books and the cultivation of literature rather than to the actual needs of ordinary conversation.

Here is one of the main differences between a cultivated and an uncultivated language. Both possess a large stock of ‘popular’ words; but the cultivated language is also rich in ‘learned’ words, with which the ruder tongue has not provided itself, simply because it has never felt the need of them.

In English it will usually be found that the so-called learned words are of foreign origin. Most of them are derived from French or Latin, and a considerable number from Greek. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Greek and Latin classics were vigorously studied by almost every English writer of any consequence, and the great authors of antiquity were regarded as models, not merely of general literary form, but of expression in all its details.

Now certain facts in the history of our language have made it peculiarity inclined to borrow from French and Latin. The Norman Conquest in the eleventh century made French the language of polite society in England; and, long after the contact between Norman-French and English had ceased to be of direct significance in our linguistic development, the reading and speaking of French and the study of French literature formed an important part of the education of English-speaking men and women. When literary English was in process of formation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the authors whose works determined the cultivated vocabulary were almost as familiar with French as with their mother tongue, and it was therefore natural that they should borrow a good many French words.

Examples of such popular words of foreign derivation are the following:

From French: army, arrest, city, engine, hour, letter, map, move, pen, pencil, river, soldier, table, village...

From Latin: act, add, animal, connect, correct, different, direct, discuss, divide, picture, regular, student, various...

From Greek: atlas, biography, chemist, dialogue, tactics, tele­graph...