Brian S. Hook
1 min readMar 14, 2022

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Latinate nouns and abstract nouns are being confused here. They are not the same. In the list of abstract nouns that you provide near the end of your article--beauty, calmness, kindness, hope, stupidity--only beauty and stupidity derive from Latin, and beauty swims through French to get there. Those nouns are indeed abstract because they describe qualities or generalities rather than things, but as your list shows, Germanic nouns (e.g. hope) can do that, too. As your article also demonstrates, Latinate nouns can be perfectly concrete, as in terrain, present, deity, etc. It seems that the real distinction you are making is between polysyllabic words and those of one or two syllables--and it is certainly true that words derived from Latin will tend to be longer.

But really, English blends them perfectly well. Consider the dying Hamlet's words to Horatio:

"Absent thee from felicity awhile,/ And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,/ To tell my story."

A highly Latinate line followed by English monosyllables: beautiful, is it not?

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Brian S. Hook
Brian S. Hook

Written by Brian S. Hook

Dad, classicist, mountain dweller, erstwhile triathlete, wannabe woodworker, follower of Socrates and Jesus (two famous non-writers), writing to avoid raveling

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