161
THE FORMALITY OF THE LATINATE LEXICON IN ENGLISH*
HARRY LEVIN, SUSAN LONG
and
CAROLE A. SCHAFFER
Cornell University
The hypothesis tested is that under instructions to be formal or in tasks that very in
formality, English words whose origins are Latinate will be chosen in preference to words
whose etymologies are Anglo-Saxon. In the first experiment, instructions to be neutral,
moderately formal or very formal led to the completion of sentences by words that were
Latinate and rare in preference to Anglo-Saxon synonyms. The second study asked subjects
to imagine themselves in situations that were less or more formal, e.g., talking to a friend
v. a job interview. The choices can be explained by textual frequencies of the words rather
than their etymologies. Finally, a replication of the first experiment with neutral and
strongly formal instructions indicated again that formality implies Latinate, textually
infrequent words. We conclude that the strategy to be formal in writing or speaking must be
explicitly given to the subjects and that the situations that call out Latinate choices must
be unequivocally formal.
INTRODUCTION
The form and vocabulary of English show the fusion of Germanic and Latinate
elements. Germanic and Latin peoples mingled in England so that the language had many
years to borrow from Latin sources into the native English, which was itself a fusion of
the dialects spoken by the Teutonic tribes: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The most
obvious result of borrowing is the English vocabulary, fifty percent of whose words are
estimated to have Latin origins. The Latin words made their way into English from two
sources: direct borrowings of words common in the Roman liturgy and in the church
schools and indirectly through Romance languages.
T.he most important influence of Latin on English was the Norman French invasion
in 1066. As the Normans lived among the native Anglo-Saxon speakers, French borrowings
into English were extensive. The aristocracy adopted French as their language as later
did the middle classes, lending social superiority to Latinate forms, a tendency which was
reinforced by the Renaissance. The fifteenth century’s revival of learning glorified classical
sources raising Greek and Ciceronian Latin as the most honored (prestigeful) forms.
More than a thousand years of language contact has provided English with rich sets
of synonyms.
..
*
This research was supported in part by a grant to the first author from The Spencer
Foundation. We thank Elizabeth Adkins, Eleanor Gibson and Rose-Marie Weber for
their comments.
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162
The richness of English in synonyms is largely due to the happy mingling of Latin,
French and native elements. It has been said that we have a synonym at each level - popular,
literary and learned. While this statement must not be pressed too hard, a difference is
often apparent, as in rise-mount-ascend, ask-question-interrogate
fire-flameIn each of these sets of three words the first is
conflagration, fear-terror-trepidation
English, the second is from French, and the third from Latin. The difference in tone between the English and French words is often slight; the Latin is generally more bookish
...
...
(Baugh, 1957, pp. 225-226).
John Crowe Ransom (1955) credits Shakespeare with maintaining the formality of
the Latin etymologies when they might have been levelled during the English renaissance. We doubt Ransom’s notion about how easily language may change or be blocked
from change, though his example makes obvious the formality of Latinate words. He
quotes from Macbeth,
.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
..
.
’
’
Ransom points out the explosion of Latinity in the third line in the context of the
English in the other three lines. He does not describe the third line as more formal except
by contrast, when he several times describes the three lines and particularly the last as
&dquo;primitive&dquo; (p. 119).
―――
Authors of manuals of style implore writers to avoid the pretensions of Latin words
when Anglo-Saxon synonyms are at hand. Strunk and White (1972, p. 69) are typical:
&dquo;Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a
twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo-Saxon is a
livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words.&dquo;
Words whose etymology is Latin appear to carry connotations of fanciness, formality,
even pedantry when compared to their Anglo-Saxon synonyms. This characteristic of
words became obvious to one of us, and the occasion was the personal impetus to this
study. I was driving with a group of Italians along a road that was flooded from an
adjacent river. I thought to myself &dquo;flood&dquo; while my companions talked about the
&dquo;inundazione.&dquo; How formal and pretentious &dquo;inundation&dquo; sounded to an English speaker
when the lowly word &dquo;flood&dquo; was at hand!
This study investigates the effects of the intention of the English speaker-reader on
the choice of one or another member of a synonym pair. We ask whether an extralinguistic circumstance such as the intention to be formal will determine the choice of
one of a pair of words. Formality of a word is sometimes called a sociolinguistic feature.
Herrmann (1978, p. 494) points out that politeness will constrain one to ask for the
bathroom rather than the john. The writer or speaker may choose one or another
synonym for purposes of style so that Macbeth in the line above could have said, &dquo;Paint
innumerable seas the color of blood&dquo;; a rewriting we present for purposes of example,
though it also shows the genius of Shakespeare.
We sought to test the notion that when the intention is to appear formal, people will
choose Latinate forms of the synonym pairs over Anglo-Saxon. Since these forms vary
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-
163
in their
frequency of occurrence in English text, we separated the words according to
frequency as well as Latinity as a characteristic of formality. We agree with Herrmann
(pp. 505-506) that &dquo;Whether or not the sociolinguistic factor of formality affects the
decision of synonymity is an open question, but it is almost certain that formality does
affect the choice of a synonym in speech production.&dquo;
EXPERIMENT I
_
Method
We chose 36
pairs of
words that were listed as synonyms in Webster’s New Collegiate
One
word of each pair was derived from a Latin or Greek root; the
Dictionary (1977).
other, from a Germanic or Old English root. E.g., anticipate is from Latin anticipare;
foresee from Old English fore and seon. The Latin words were slightly longer in number
of letters though the difference was not significant (Z = -1.S4).
The textual frequency of each word was supplied by Kucera and Francis’s (1967)
count of the number of times the word appeared in a sample of one million words.
The frequencies of occurrence ranged from 515 for thought to zero for wane and nimble.
Given the frequencies of all the words, the Latin and Anglo-Saxon forms do not differ
significantly (Z -1.S4). In nine pairs the Latinate word is more frequent; in 13 pairs
the Anglo-Saxon word is more frequent; for 11 pairs the two words do not differ in
frequency. Three pairs involved compound verbs (put off, cut off, take apart) for which
frequency counts are not available.
We devised a sentence frame for each pair of words; that is, 36 sentences with 36
word pairs. The sentences provided a neutral context in which each word of the pair
seemed equally appropriate. The sentences, pairs of words and their textual frequencies
are shown in Table 1.
=
..
Subjects. The subjects were undergraduate students enrolled in various psychology
Each subject appeared in only one of the three experimental groups.
Procedure. Three groups differed in the instructions they received. For each, the
courses.
instructions and the sentences were mimeographed in booklets to which the
responded in various group administrations.
Neutral
(N
Slightly
Formal
you were
37): Circle the word in each pair that fits best into the sentence.
(N 17): Read each sentence and the pair of words with it. Suppose that
writing this sentence in a formal situation, such as in a formal essay. Circle the
=
=
word that you would choose for such
Strongly Formal (N
that sounds
1
subjects
more
a
situation.
26): Consider each pair of sentences and put
formal.’
=
a
check next to the
one
The sentences and word pairs differed in how they were presented for the three
conditions. The neutral and slightly formal groups saw the sentence typed once with
the pair of words together in their position in the sentence. The strongly formal
group saw the sentence typed out twice, once with each word of the pair inserted.
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164
TABLE 1
Sentences, Synonym Pairs, Origins, and Textual Frequencies
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H. Levin, Susan
Long and C.A. Schaffer
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165
166
~
Number of Latin and
TABLE 2
Anglo-Saxon words preferred by each group
’
..
R esul ts
analysis of the data was designed to answer three questions: (1) whether the
formality instructions influenced the choice of Latin over Anglo-Saxon synonyms; (2) whether the degree of formality led to the choice of the more frequent word of the
The
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167
TABLE 3
Number of higher and lower
frequency words preferred by each group
pair; and (3) whether the etymology and frequency of the words interacted in their
relations to formality. In Table 2 are presented the choices of pairs in which the Latin
word or Anglo-Saxon word was significantly preferred by the subjects. The left hand
column should be read as showing that under neutral instructions, in 19 pairs the Latin
words were chosen, in 12 pairs Anglo-Saxon was preferred and in 5 pairs there was
no significant choice of one word-type over the other. The distribution of choices in
this table differs significantly from chance (X2 11.0; df 4; p < 0.05).
Note that Latin was the modal preference under all conditions of formality. The
=
differences among groups indicate that slightly formal instructions led to a decreased use
of Anglo-Saxon words and to an increase of pairs where no word was obviously preferred
by the group. Finally, when the instructions were strongly formal the subjects continued
to avoid Anglo-Saxon so that, correspondingly, Latinate forms were highly preferred.
Of the 36 pairs of words, 22 pair-mates differed significantly from each other in
textual frequency (as measured by Chi-square and binomial tests). Whether the formality
groups differed in preference in frequent or infrequent words, irrespective of origin,
is answered by the data in Table 3. The distribution of choices differ significantly from
chance (X2
20.5, df = 4; p < 0.01). The most obvious result is that the neutral group
chose words of higher frequency (15 of 22 choices) and the strongly formal group chose
less frequent words (14 of 22 choices).
The interaction between word origin and word frequency was analyzed in the
following way. Each pair of synonyms was characterized by the relative textual frequency
of two words. In 13 pairs, the Anglo-Saxon word is more frequent than the Latin, in nine
pairs Latin is more frequent and for 1 1 pairs the two words do not differ significantly
in their frequency of occurrence.
In order to clarify the subsequent analysis, consider the choices made by the people
in the neutral group, of those pairs in which the Latin alternative is textually more
frequent than the Anglo-Saxon. There were nine such pairs responded to by the 37
=
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168
TABLE 4
Proportion of Latin choices for pairs
of different textual
frequency
in the neutral group. We are dealing, therefore, with a total of 9 x 37 or 333
choices, of which the Latin word was chosen 228 times. To present the interaction most
clearly we calculated the proportion of the total choices which was Latin - in the
example, 228 -;- 333 0.68. The proportion of Latin choices was calculated in the same
manner for each of the nine cells and presented in Table 4. The distribution of proportions in this table differs significantly from chance (X2
16.02, df = 4, p < 0.01). The
nature of the interaction can be seen by reading down the three columns. Under neutral
and slightly formal conditions, the proportions of Latin choices increase as the Latin
words are more frequent than the Anglo-Saxon. The pattern is reversed in the strongly
subjects
=
=
,
formal condition. Under those instructions the subjects chose the Latinate, infrequent
words. Said another way, it appears that our subjects interpret formality to be signalled
by words that are Latin in origin and infrequent in use. This finding is particularly clear if
we count the number of pairs for which this effect occurred. Out of 13 pairs where the
Latin word is less frequent, the strongly formal group chose the Latin word in 12 pairs.
’
EXPERIMENT II
In Experiment I degrees of formality were ordered on the basis of the Experimenter’s
judgments. External, more objective grounds for determining the formality of various
situations were required, which is the principal purpose of this experiment.
Method
--
Degrees of formality. Six situations - three having to do with speaking and three with
writing - were chosen. Forty-one subjects ranked the formality of the situations. Although
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169
TABLE 5
Proportion of Latin choices
N
26
Subjects in each condition.
for
ranking
=
presented
for pairs of different textual
most formal
was:
in random
(1) speaking
to
frequency
order, the resulting order of the situations from least to
a friend, (2) writing a letter to a friend, (3) presenting
class, (4) writing
a term paper, (5) writing a job application, and (6) an interview for a job. The rankings ordered the situations with little overlap into three groups
with writing the more formal in two, but the job interview the most formal.
a
report
to
a
Subjects. The
156 respondents.
subjects
were
college students,
26 in each of six groups for
a
total of
Procedure.
Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the six formality conditions. As
Experiment I, each subject chose one of each pair of sentences. The sentences were
identical to those used in the earlier experiment (see Table 1). With the least formal
condition as an example, the instructions on the test booklet were as follows: &dquo;This
booklet contains thirty-six pairs of sentences. The members in each pair are very similar
in meaning. Suppose you were writing a letter to a friend and you have occasion to use
in
these sentences. Check which member of each
your letter.&dquo;
pair you would be
most
likely
to
use
in
’
Results
The findings are summarized in Table 5. The entries in this table were calculated in
the same way as in Table 4 and represent the proportion of choices that were Latinate. If
there were no consistent basis of choice, each cell of the table would show a proportion
equal to 0.50. The chi-square of the obtained array of choices is 365, 10 df, p < 0.0005.
As in the first experiment, there was an over-all tendency to prefer the Latinate over
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170
TABLE 6
Proportion
of Latin choices for
pairs of different textual frequency
the
.
.
Anglo-Saxon forms. However, there were no obvious patterns having to do with the
degree of formality of whether the task involved speech or writing. The center row of
Table 5, in which the Latin and Anglo-Saxon synonyms are equal in textual frequency, is
informative. Under all conditions about 60% of the choices tended to be Latinate. By
reading down the columns of the table, it is clear that the textual frequency of the word
had the most profound influence on the sentences chosen by the subjects. The highest
choice of Latin forms occurs on those words where the Latin word is more frequent
than the Anglo-Saxon; next where they are equal; and least where Latin is less frequent
than Anglo-Saxon.
Before accounting for the differences between the two experiments, we wanted to
be sure that the findings in Experiment I were trustworthy and replicable.
’
~
’
’
EXPERIMENT III
_
Experiment I was replicated using two conditions only: the neutral condition and the
strongly formal condition. The instructions to the subjects were the same as in Experiment
I and the sentence pairs were the same as used in the two previous experiments. The
subjects were 52 undergraduate students, 26 in each group.
Results
-
The findings of this experiment are presented in Table 6. These proportions were
calculated in the same fashion as the results in Tables 4 and 5. The findings closely
replicate those in Experiment I (see Table 4). The proportions deviate significantly
from chance (X2
161, 2 df, p < 0.0005). As in the first experiment, we can best
=
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_
171
summarize these findings as showing that under more formal instructions subjects chose
Latin forms more frequently than Anglo-Saxon and also chose less frequent forms more
than those having higher textual frequency. In other words, formality is defined by our
subjects as Latinate words that are not frequent.
DISCUSSION
How do we understand the strong and replicable findings in Experiments I and III
and the absence of results in Experiment II? The experiments differed in several ways.
In I and III, the subjects were instructed to make choices in a situation as &dquo;they normally
would&dquo; or in which the word formal was explicit. The instructions were general, not
tied to any specific task. They may or may not have imagined specific situations. Experiment II did not mention the word formal and, what is more, asked the respondents to
imagine themselves in a specific situation. Since each group of subjects had only one
situation, they were not able to contrast it with a more or less formal setting. The general
instructions on the other hand may have induced a strategy of thinking about formal
versus informal situations as the subjects regarded each pair of sentences. For example,
the findings in &dquo;speaking to a friend&dquo; almost perfectly replicate the &dquo;Neutral&dquo; condition
in the third experiment.
For the moment, we believe that the six situations in Experiment II did not tap the
degree of formality that motivates the choice of infrequent Latinate words. The word
formal is important, and we think the opportunity to compare more than one degree of
formality implicitly or explicitly is necessary. Certainly, we can imagine situations that
most people think of as formal. For example, a recent United States ambassador to the
Court of St. James replied to the Queen when she asked whether he was settled comfortably : &dquo;We are still, in the residence, subject to some discomfiture and inconvenience
owing to certain elements of refurbishment&dquo; (Trilling, 1971).
Speakers and writers adopt formal strategies for speech and writing under explicit
instructions to be formal or, lacking such instructions, under conditions that are strongly
coercive toward formal language.
REFERENCES
BAUGH, A.C. (1957).
A History of the English Language (2nd ed.) (New York).
HERRMANN, D.J. (1978). An old problem for the new psychosemantics: Synonymy. Psychological
Bulletin, 85, 490-512.
H. and FRANCIS, W.N. (1967). Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English
(Providence).
RANSOM, J.D. (1955). On Shakespeare’s Language. In
Poems and Essays (New York).
STRUNK, W., Jr., and WHITE, E.B. (1972). The Elements of Style (2nd ed.) (New York).
TRILLING, L. (1971). Sincerety and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.).
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1977). (Springfield, Mass.).
KU&Ccaron;ERA,
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