I know very little about botany or horticulture, and am no kind of gardener, but I was very pleased to learn that a rather lovely plant which is growing outside our house goes by the name of osteospermum. It is also sometimes called an African daisy.
The scientific name was given to it by the famous Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, the “father of modern taxonomy”. The etymology of the plant’s name is interesting, and places it in the category of coinages which have, over the years, been found to be controversial by various commentators.
This is because the elements of the word osteospermum, which is obviously not English in origin, have been borrowed into our language from two different languages. Osteo comes from the Ancient Greek word for “bone”, while spermum is from the Latin word for “seed”. (The genus which osteospermum belongs to has the characteristic of producing extremely hard seeds, hence “bone-like”).
To the extent that there actually is any controversy surrounding this type of compound word, it concerns the mixing together of elements from both Latin and Greek sources. This represents a very particular kind of linguistic purism, where the objection is not to importing alien items into your native vocabulary but rather to importing items which result in some kind of “impure” hybrid.
When the neologism television first appeared on the scene in English, some people objected to it on the grounds that it was a “mongrel” word: it was coined from Greek tele (“far, at a distance”) and Latin visio (“sight, viewing”). CP Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian newspaper (as it then was), is supposed to have remarked something like: “Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good can come of it!”
Some communities demonstrate much more stringent types of purism than this, rejecting all lexical borrowings, sometimes as part of national governmental policy. In western Europe, the Faroe Islands and Iceland, whose languages are closely related, there are committees which propose words for new items and concepts by using forms from their own native stock, obviating the need to borrow elements from classical languages.
The word for “television” in both Icelandic and Faroese is sjónvarp, where sjón means “sight, vision” and varp is “throwing, projection”. In many other languages, the word for television follows the same hybrid Greek-Latin borrowing model which we have in English: the French word is télévision, in Finnish it is televisio, the Polish is telewizja, and the Albanian is televizioni. In Modern Greek, as you might expect, the situation is a little different, with the Ancient Greek word for vision (όρασις) rather than the Latin element coming into play: the Modern Greek word for television is τηλεόραση (tiliórasi).
These are, of course, by no means the only hybrid loans we have in modern English. Other more contemporary mixed Latin-Greek examples in English include liposuction, multimedia and hyperactive. The word hyperactive derives from Greek hyper– meaning “over, beyond, overmuch, excessive” plus Latin activus (“given to activity”), derived from actus “a doing or act”.
Liposuction comes from the Greek lipos meaning “fat” plus Latin suctionem “sucking”, formed from the past-participle of the verb sugere “to suck”.
Whatever we might think about this procedure, happily no one now thinks it appropriate to condemn the word itself, or other words like it, for their “mongrel” origins.
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Mongrel
The English-origin word mongrel refers to non-pedigree dogs of mixed parentage. The word has the same root as other native English words such as among and mingle, via Old English gemong/ymong “mixture, mingling”. It is related to Dutch mengelen “to mix” and German Menge “crowd”.
