Quote:
Originally Posted by jeremy_haak
Random quite interesting fact, apparently isle and island have different etymologies. Island is actually from Old English (igland->iland->island) while Isle is from Latin (insula->ile->isle).
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English is full of that. Almost every concept in English has an Anglosaxon/Old English way of saying it, and a French/Latin way of saying it. Usually the Anglosaxon way is more casual/colloquial while the French/Latin way is more formal/literary.
Here's a bunch of pairs of this--in all of these, the first word is Anglosaxon-origin and the second word is French/Latin origin:
behead / decapitate
wrong / false
sheep / mutton
birthday / anniversary
piss / urine
hurt / pain
answer / respond
before / prior
begin / commence
belly / abdomen
brotherly / fraternal
.. and literally hundreds more.
This all stems from the situation in Medieval England, where all the upper classes spoke French while the commoners spoke English; the French influence survived in English by being used as the language's "refined" words.
At various points in history, some writers (such as George Orwell, for example) have often made the deliberate choice of using Old English origin words as much as possible as a nationalist or populist statement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingui...ism_in_English