(non-native speaker)
Is there a reason why the English language has “special” words for a specific topic, like related to court (plaintiff, defendant, warrant, litigation), elections/voting (snap election, casting a ballot)?
And in other cases seems lazy, like firefighter, firetruck, homelessness (my favorite), mother-in-law, newspaper.
Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat? A lot of the law related words are from French derivations AFAIK?
Domain specific language is found across all realms of society, even firefighters have words or phrases with a specific meaning (back-burning, pumper, appliance, etc). So maybe its not that some areas are lazy, its just that you haven’t been exposed to their more technical side?
Yeah, those legal terms have been more-or-less common to any romance language I’ve used.
A language is not its vocabulary; that’s like pretending that the critter is just its fur.
English vocabulary is from multiple sources, but that is not exactly unique or special.
Law terminology specifically can seem pretty archaic because there’s a high need for terms to be stable over time. In other fields and everyday speech terms can change over time. There’s contracts signed decades or even centuries ago that are still binding today. So it’s practical in a sense if the words within and those used to discuss legal dealings don’t change over time.