why do the important words have translations from greek and latin?

Question

why r these two languages soooo important?why cant there be origins with hindi,tamil,sanskrit,etc?

Answer 1

There are origins in those other languages.
Latin and Greek are important because of the civilizations that came from Greece and Rome influenced the world, both in language and culture. The two empires discovered much of the foundation knowledge that is in use today and the words describing that knowledge are rooted back to them. Another factor is that both languages were in common use all over the ancient world during the peak of each civilization.
Although Latin is a dead language, with few fluent speaks and no native ones, it still has a large impact in the fields of science, academia, and law. Roughly 60% of all the words spoken in Western Europe and the Americas root in Latin.

Answer 2

1. Many of the greek and latin words are derived from Sanskrit, but that takes you back several layers.
2. 18,000 words in the Oxf. Eng. Dict. have Sanskrit derivations given.
3. Most English lexicographers train in Greek and Latin, and very few in Sanskrit.
4. Some English words do come from Hindi: jungle, punch (the beverage, with five/panc ingredients), for example. But Hindi is a fairly new language, and couldn't have much influence at the time English was forming half a world away. Thus we only have direct loan words.
5. Tamil was and is a dravidian language, not part of the Indo-European language family. We might expect as much influence from Chinese.

But as I now read the q to ask about 'important' words, I'll bet its because for many years the most educated people in our society studied Greek and Latin in 'prep' school. At one time it meant something very different to 'go to school' and particularly to 'go to college.' So doctors and lawyers all knew greek. There may also be some attempt to have a lingua franca that would make scientific discoveries accessible to non-English speakers, and lastly, up until 300 years or so ago, many scholarly works were still composed in Latin.

Answer 3

In English, the basic vocabulary is Germanic but it gained many words from Latin and Greek through the church, the law and via French with the Norman conquest.

English is a language which borrows words from languages all over the world. If it needs a word and another language has it, English will pinch it. There are many English words from Hindi that came into the language from the British Raj. Two that come to mind are "bungalow" and "khaki".

If you really want an English word from a language that few people have heard of, try the language Guugu Yimidhirr from the Cooktown area in north Queensland. It was from that language that Joseph Banks collected the word "kangaroo" in 1770.

Answer 4

I think you're thinking of medical/technological/scientific terminology, is that right?
Our scientific and technological culture is basically derived from knowledge that was first developed (or at least, first written down) by the ancient Greeks, and then the Romans.
Later during Occidental history, Latin was the language of the Church, and the Church was associated with knowledge (they were the ones who copied ancient treatises, along with Arabic scientists of course), and thus it became a type of _lingua franca_ that allowed communication between knowledgeable people all around the world. New terms for new discoveries were devised from Greek and Latin roots.
We have inherited these conventions (for instance, the nomenclature code for living species uses Latin/Greek or latinized terms) because people all over the world know these roots and can understand them. It's an international code.

Of course, every language has its own history and very diverse etymologies (origins/history) of words. The development of Oriental scientific knowledge in many cases predates Occidental science; but historical circumstances made our scientific vocabulary 'evolve' the way it did.

Answer 5

Demon does not translate precisely into Latin. Do you recommend a spirit which haunts or takes over a guy or woman ? Do you recommend an evil imp ? cleanser could prefer to specify what variety of cleanser - abode cleanser, launderer, somebody who cleans you in a Roman tub with a strigil after having coated you with oil - all completely diverse words.

Answer 6

Greek and Latin derived words from laws, philosophy and these parts of culture. Today we rarely use pure greek words in technology or in medicine. But they all exist there even if we don't realise it.

Answer 7

because these words discovered there