Why is the intransitive form of "obtain" so common in academic writing and so uncommon elsewhere?

There's a low-frequency use of "obtain" that's intransitive, and means something like "occur" or "hold true."

Merriam Webster says:

intransitive verb

1: to be generally recognized or established : PREVAIL

This usage is pretty common in academic writing, especially science writing:

• "A morphological effect obtains for isolated words but not for words in sentence context"
• "Bi-layer molybdenum disulfide obtains from molybdenum disulfide-melamine cyanurate superlattice with a thermal shock"
• "...the conditions under which this was demonstrated are not those that obtain after vaccination."
• "This situation obtains despite the fact that teaching is a profession which..."

However, this sense is used so rarely in everyday speech that I didn't know it existed until adulthood, and trying to use it outside of academic writing usually just results in listeners thinking you've made an error (not that I'm speaking from personal experience or anything).

Is one of these the original meaning? How did the other one come about? And how did the intransitive version end up nearly exclusive to academic writing?

Solution 1:

The English word “obtain” derives from the Latin verb obtineo, directly or via French obtenir. In Latin it is usually transitive (“to hold, maintain, acquire”), but it can also be intransitive (“to maintain itself; to hold, prevail, last, stand, continue” according to the Lewis/Short Latin dictionary). English borrowed it in both meanings in the early New English period, but it has remained a formal word, in the transitive meaning as a fancy variant of “get”; the intransitive meaning, rare already in Latin, is even more formal in English. So it is not that the word changed its meaning in English; it is that the rarer meaning of the Latin word caught on only in a very small sphere.