Isn't it the other way round in a lot of cases, where (West) Europeans were a bunch of nerds and decided to use Ancient Greek to coin words for things?
When we got back on the plane, they pointed out another man who did speak Portuguese, so I sat next to him. He had been studying neurosurgery in Maryland, so it was very easy to talk with him as long as it was about cirugia neural, o cerebreu, and other such "complicated" things. The long words are actually quite easy to translate into Portuguese because the only difference is their endings: "-tion" in English is "-cao" in Portuguese; "-ly" is "-mente," and so on. But when he looked out the window and said something simple, I was lost: I couldn't decipher "the sky is blue."
I got off the plane in Recife (the Brazilian government was going to pay the part from Recife to Rio) and was met by the father-in-law of Cesar Lattes, who was the director of the Center for Physical Research in Rio, his wife, and another man. As the men were off getting my luggage, the lady started talking to me in Portuguese: "You speak Portuguese? How nice! How was it that you learned Portuguese?"
I replied slowly, with great effort. "First, I started to learn Spanish... then I discovered I was going to Brazil..." Now I wanted to say, "So, I learned Portuguese," but I couldn't think of the word for "so." I knew how to make BIG words, though, so I finished the sentence like this: "CONSEQUENTEMENTE, apprendi Portugues!"
When the two men came back with the baggage, she said, "Oh, he speaks Portuguese! And with such wonderful words: CONSEQUENTEMENTE!"
—Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
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u/AkaruLyte Harry Potter 5h ago
Happens sometimes to me in Spanish. “Geométricamente” just doesn’t seem real but it’s how you say “geometrically”