Name for native English inferiority to French/Latin/Greek

Question

My question is whether there is a name for the phenomenon, and also if there is a body of literature including popular exposition about it, of which the paragraphs below exhibit examples.

"Nativity" is a fancy word for "birth", and what makes it "fancy" seems to be that it's derived from Latin. English-speaking people tend to regard words obviously derived from Latin or Greek as more hifalutin than words of Germanic origin. "Substance" is more dignified than "stuff"; "decay" more formal than "rotting"; "predict" more scientific than "foretell". When Arthur C. Clarke wanted to make the names of two characters in a story set in the very distant future seem futuristic, he called them Eriston and Etania, which seem like ancient Greek names (Or do they? I now find something on the web saying "Eriston" is of English origin and means "son of Eric", but I am doubtful).

It seems at least somewhat plausible to explain this by saying that people who spoke Latin and were familiar with books in Greek (maybe especially the New Testament?) brought civilization and literacy to British barbarians.

I have heard that something similar happens in Korea. Korean names of numbers bigger than 1000 are Chinese words.

I know enough about Swahili to know that it's pretty easy to tell which words in that language are derived from Arabic, and among those are all words that would be known only to literate people and unknown only in non-literate communities. The word "kitabu", meaning "book" is obviously of Arabic origin, although its way of being used in Swahili is completely adapted to that Bantu language, as seen in the fact that its plural is "vitabu" (it is one of a class of nouns in Swahili whose singular (in most instances) begins with "ki-" and whose plural begins with "vi-"). I don't know whether Swahili-speaking people feel the same way about Arabic-versus-Bantu as English-speaking people do about Latin/Greek-versus-Germanic-or-otherwise-barbarian.

Is there a name for this phenomenon, whereby even after centuries of development into erudite thinking, people feel that words that come from formerly more civilized foreigners are more civilized, literate, dignified, or formal than native words? What other instances of it exist than English and Korean?

Answer 1

Japanese is the classic example of the phenomenon you describe, which in the linguistic literature is sometimes referred to as lexical classes or lexical strata.

In Japanese, there are three lexical strata:

• Yamato Japanese: words that don't have their origin in borrowing from another language.
• Sino-Japanese: words originating from Chinese, centuries ago. Sino-Japanese words often seem "fancier" or more educated than Yamato Japanese words. As such, this is analogous to the Latinate lexical stratum in English.
• Modern borrowings (from English, Portuguese, etc.)

The three lexical strata in Japanese differ not just in social significance, but also in terms of phonology and morphology (here is a short article discussing how).

Similarly, in English, we have at least two meaningfully different lexical strata:

• Germanic (e.g. birth)
• Latinate (e.g. nativity), which also effectively includes words originating from Greek.

Just as in Japanese, not only is the "non-native" stratum considered more erudite than the native one, there are grammatical differences between the strata (although fewer than there are in Japanese). For instance, the suffix -ate or -ation in English can only directly attach to a Latinate word, e.g. vary -> variation, but not bury -> *buriation.