From a talk by William Zinsser to foreign students learning English – about words derived from Latin:.
In general they are long, pompous nouns that end in –ion – like implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!) – or that end in –ent – like development and fulfillment. Those nouns express a vague concept or an abstract idea, not a specific action that we can picture – somebody doing something. Here’s a typical sentence: “Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement.” That means “Before we fixed our money problems.”
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Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves has launched a competition on how best to replace foreign words that sound ugly to Estonian ears or are hard to pronounce.
A fine idea, writes the daily, Eesti Päevaleht: “By all means words like ‘infrastructure’ or ‘directive’ can be replaced by words from our own language. In general, more should be done to anchor our pretty Estonian language in the state bureaucracy. These bureaus, for example, the Foreign Ministry, use the ugliest turns of phrase. A few years ago a document went around with the dreadful title ‘Position paper on the Nordic dimension.’ Could that not have been said another way? To strengthen the Estonian language we don’t have to invent new terms, it’s enough to have recourse to our own words. Instead of ‘complicated’ you can say ‘tricky’; and ‘lasting’ is just fine instead of ‘permanent.’”
The book, Otto & Daria: A Wartime Journey Through No Man's Land, was launched on Saturday, September 24. 
Sketches 
Yes!
Plain speaking makes things clear.
If bureaucrats, academics and professionals banned jargon and words with Latin roots everyone would understand them better and their efforts would
have more impact.
The more complex the issue, the more useful it is to write simply.
It’s difficult to write simply using the words ordinary people use, but it’s worth the effort.
Here’s a joke to confuse things:
Before universal suffrage, two men in a pub try to understand what it’s all about.
Ed: What’s this universal suffrage business all about?
Ted: Well, it’s one person, one vote. That’s how it works.
Ed: What do you mean, one person, one vote?
Ted: One f****ing person, one f****ing vote!
Ed: Hey, why didn’t they say that in the first place?
Human speech has many purposes – to be understood is only one of them.
Yes, absolutely.
I would exempt poetry and literature, for example, from the need to be immediately understandable. Intimation of otherness and evocation of deep feeling hold a very important place in communication. Even to discuss such matters is very difficult without complex language.
Some languages favour poetry, others the exact. Airport in Swahili is “the place where the large birds land”.
I wouldn’t ban Latin roots (maybe my name gives rise to a bias) but I certainly would like to to repace words like “infrastructure” with words from our own language.
Nice idea, Horace. I agree infrastructure isn’t a pretty word.
(I’m very happy to know Estonian is full of them. I know those people sing a lot, but I didn’t know that about their words.)
Following on, I wonder what a simple word, or short phrase, for “infrastructure” might be…”the functional things that support it”? “the structures needed for it all to work”?
Maybe we should use that engineers’ and provisioners’ term only when speaking with engineers or purchasing agents to refer shorthand to “all that other stuff we’ll have to design or buy, but I don’t have to bore you with just now”. I.e. the when we’re with the Romans among us.
Maybe with the rest, and with our inner Estonians, we should use concrete referents – like bridges, roads, internet – I wish I knew Estonian words for them! – and if we mean the general idea, we can hope the concrete words work as synecdoche (that’s Greek, no?).
Provide us with the implementation and we shall complete the operation.
or..
Give us the tools and we’ll do the job.
Clear English that everyone can understand. Just taught my class about that this week. Plain language in whatever language you speak. How about that?
Why are roads and bridges “infra”structure?
The Americans have been working on simplification for years, largely as a result of sloppiness of pronunciation. Missal, missile, and missel are all pronounced exactly the same way.
If they are not careful, they will soon be launching thrushes!!
They also work very hard on turning nouns into verbs which usually means some justification of inactivity.
BF
Right. And heaven defend us from guided missals. Pilated or not.
Fix and money also come to us from Latin: fix from fixus, from figere, and money from moneta. Those who are interested in knowing which of the words we use come from Latin (or Greek) rather than from Germanic roots, and many of them do, can easily check for free at, for instance, dictionary.com. (Just in that last sentence, for instance: interest, use, easy, check, and instance all come from Latin, some by way of French or Spanish.)
I generally agree with clarity and straightforwardness in language, but one of the glories of a complex language with a large and somewhat redundant vocabulary is that we can set the tone and attitude quite easily and distinctively, and make it clear in a few words what genre a text is situating itself in. We don’t want to toss out the big words altogether; we just don’t want to hide behind them. We should use them judiciously, not reflexively.
And at the very least, any sort of nativist attitude towards English usage is a non-starter (and not just because nativist also comes from Latin). Although our most basic function words, and most words for the most basic things, are from English’s Germanic roots, no less than 80% of our general vocabulary comes from other languages, especially Latin (often via other romance languages) and Greek. It behooves a person who wishes to make pronouncements and prescriptions for a language to know whereof he or she is speaking. To which end I offer a quick course in the subject: An appreciation of English: A language in motion.
And, incidentally, not all the stuffy words are Latin – Behoove and whereof are both straight from Old English, for example – and (as we have already seen) not all of the plain-sounding words aren’t. But what William Zinsser was really talking about is derived abstract nominalizations. Which is a separate matter from the Latin-versus-English issue.
Incidentally, one language that has managed generally to keep its word stock “native” is Icelandic. When a new word is needed for something – the automobile or the computer, for instance, both of which use Latin words in English (car also has a Latin source) – they have a sort of national debate about the right word to use; suggestions are made mainly on the basis of adaptations and syntheses of other Icelandic words, and ultimately one prevails: in the cases in question, bill for an automobile and talva for a computer (formed by a merger of an adapted word used for “electricity” and a name of a mythical prophetess, if memory serves).
Thank you for your excellent response.