Are Anglo-Saxon words better at expressing emotion? [closed]

I think that this intuition that made some people think that Saxon words are better for expressing emotion, though a rather vague one, is not so rare.

Before the invasion of the French with William the Conqueror, non-Germanic words were much rarer in English. When the newer French c.q. Latin words came to England with the bureaucracy of the conquerors, they were first used in officialese and other educated language of the higher classes, while most common people probably hardly ever used a Latin word.

After a thousand years, many of those Latin words have become so normal as to replace Germanic words even for common, daily, concrete things. However, maximum entropy has not yet been reached, and it can still be seen that concrete, down-to-earth things have a higher chance of being referred to by Germanic words most of the time, whereas abstract things are more often referred to by words of Latin origin. In other words, most abstract words in English have a Latin origin.

It is commonly thought that most people find it easier and more natural to speak of concrete things rather than abstract things - on average, all things considered, etc. For example, it is thought that people use more concrete language, say, when they are drunk. Perhaps this has not been proved scientifically, but I think many people believe it to be true intuitively. Hence they believe that, in order to express an emotion, something close to the heart, it is slightly more natural to use Saxon words than Latin words, while formal, business-like language is often full of Latin words. Of course it would be a mixture of both kinds, but a somewhat higher percentage of Saxon words is what they believe to find. They might be thinking of an example like this:

Would you do me the honour of introducing me to this female acquaintance of yours?

Hey, that girl you were talking to is hot; take me to her, will you?

The formal language of the first sentence, full of Latin words, is for me much less expressive of emotion than the second one. Though formality and abstraction are difficult to extricate, I believe that it is not entirely unreasonable to suppose that abstraction alone has a distancing effect too.

I would suppose that it's because Anglo-Saxon words are more likely to, say, begin with a fricative or affricate, and have mostly short vowel sounds. Sound symbolism posits that these words sound objectively sharper, harsher, and stronger than their Romantic kin, which share a certain simple Latinate syllable flow that more often than not makes them mellifluous and pleasant.

Writers are often told to use words of Anglo-Saxon origin because in English they feel much more direct and decisive, and are better at cutting to the chase when it comes to describing action. I don't see why this wouldn't hold true for emotion words as well: the impression seems to be that the Anglo-Saxon words are simpler and may provoke the more visceral reaction, for better or for worse. Consider the Anglo-Saxon:

• happiness
• sadness
• anger
• trust
• fear
• love
• awe

And some rough Romantic equivalents:

• joy
• depression
• rage
• confidence
• terror
• adoration
• reverence

Sure, it's subjective, but there's definitely something to it. Of course, I could have chosen fewer French-derived examples, since you could argue that French is too mixed-up in the history of English as well as its Celtic neighbours to be reliably called all that Romantic.