1123: Replaced by Loan Words Jan 5, 2018

Many of the words that exist in English now come from Old French. Famously, this is why there is a difference between words for meats as the animals sometimes i.e. 'pork' is not 'pig' in the way that 'chicken' is both an animal and a food, since the animals' names are Germanic but the richer Normans gave their words for the foods they could afford more often. Still, this does not explain why words like 'caterpillar' are Romantic in origin, and replaced the Old English, in this case 'lēafwyrm' or 'cawelwyrm' though. Indeed, many modern loan words exist because there is not an equivalent, such as 'sushi', a word which was borrowed because the food was borrowed as well, but many words do not need replacement. To put a complicated and controversial issue simply, anything can be expressed in any language, so long as the referents are understood. With this in mind then, there might not seem to be a reason to ever borrow words, nor especially why 'dolphin' replaced the more logical 'mereswīn' (sea-pig), but the only way this makes sense is that there are synonyms to words quite often; even looking at a modern dictionary, there are several reason, including simplicity, politics, and luck that some words can be thought of as replacing others. They are the same reasons that 'fun' is more common than 'jollification', for example.

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