in fairness English does this a lot even in the modern day, take for example words like Umami, Siesta, Rendezvous, or Schadenfreude. these get sprinkled into conversations to add context and add “flair” to conversations or to attempt to communicate more eloquently. There’s this culture of English being such a widely used and flexible standard where rules are far too complex or dependent on location that there is relatively few “language police” and you can pretty much get away with any other languages loan words as long as it is an adjective or noun. People like to sound intelligent and cultured and sprinkling a couple easy to recognize loan words tends to “fit the bill”.

Sounds like a bit of a cliché to me.

This is pretty much exactly what happened with Latin and Greek (and Arabic to a lesser degree) borrowings, but it was in the 1500s instead of the 1200s with the huge influx of Classical terms coming over from the continent during the Renaissance, and the resulting new coinages from Greek and Latin roots.

Often dubbed the “Inkhorn Controversy” (after “Inkhorn terms”, words that only come out of an inkwell, instead of out of the mouth of a traditional speaker, which is still used for unnecessarily erudite terms/borrowings), there were basically three different reactions to this phenomenon during this period. First were the Neologizers, who, as Sir Thomas Elyot put it in 1531, wanted to “borrow of the latin language for the insufficiencie of our own language”.

The Neologizers believed that it was necessary to adopt these learned terms of new academic and cultural fields, or otherwise English would remain (to use a recent borrowing at the time) barbarous. Elyot paired his neologisms with established words and phrases to make their meanings more understandable: “animate or gyue courage to others”, “the beste fourme of education or bringing up of noble children”. But what makes Elyot virtually unique in his time is his acute understanding that to introduce a new term is to disturb an established semantic field by displacing the synonyms which already exist. This understanding is most clearly evidenced in his remarks justifying the introduction of maturity: ‘wherevnto we lacke a name in englisshe’: ‘Maturitie is a meane between two extremities / wherein nothing lacketh or excedeth … Therefore that worde maturitie is translated to the actis of man / that whan they be done with such moderation / that nothing in the doinge may be sene superfluous or indigent / we may saye / that they be maturely done: reseruing the wordes ripe and ready to frute and other thinges seperate from affaires / as we haue now in vsage. And this do I nowe remembre for the necessary augmentation of our language’. And, in fact, the borrowed term “maturity” has indeed acquired an intellectual, abstract register, while the native word “ripe” has moved to a more physical, concrete register.

The Purists and Archaizers, on the other hand, protested what they saw as the excessive borrowing of foreign words, which they termed “dark words” (words of dark or obscure origin, which they claimed were not easy to understand). The Purists pointed to numerous recent examples of people misusing and misunderstanding these recent borrowings – thinking “restitution” meant ‘robbery’ instead of ‘repayment, compensation’, for example.

This went along with the movement to translate the Bible into English, and so nationalistic pride at the suitability of vulgar English for the Holy Writ was high. English was good enough already, so there was no need for these fancy borrowings from the mainland. Even the first professor of Greek at Cambridge, Sir John Cheke, strongly opposed the use of Greek in English:

“I am this opinion that our own tung should be written cleane and pure, vnmixt and vnmangeled with borrowing of other tunges, wherein if we take not heed by tijm, euer borrowing and neuer payeng, she shall fain to keep her house as bankrupt.” -1561   

Mirroring the later creations of the Academies of the various Romance languages, Cheke coined awkward terms like “gainrising” for ‘resurrection’, “groundwrought” for ‘founded’, and “moond” for ‘lunatic’. These new “English” terms, of course, are at least as opaque as the borrowings were, if not moreso.

It’s no coincidence that it’s in 1553 that we first get the phrase “The King’s English”, as opposed to people who “pouder their talke with oversea language”, who “so Latin their tongues, that the simple cannot but wonder at their talke.”

Similarly, the Archaizers “laboured to restore, as to theyr rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as haue ben long time out of vse and almost cleane disherited”. Their “archaisms” though, words created to sound more “natively English”, were usually completely, hilariously wrong, and contained a ton of folk etymologies and similar alterations and misunderstandings. Possibly most famously, derring do, a misprinted version of Chaucer’s (Middle English) dorrying don “daring to do” being reinterpreted as an old-fashioned noun that supposedly meant “daring action/chivalry”.

So yeah, this was a period where people were absolutely saying “using Latin and Greek just plain makes us better than you!”