Multilingual, polyglot and many-tongued

Most of us are aware that our Anglo-Saxon ancestors spoke Old English, but that our language was subsequently enriched from (among others) two main sources: Norman and Angevin French, whose language had evolved from vernacular Latin; and renaissance scholars’ use of classical Latin and Greek. So very often we have in our vocabulary word-synonyms derived from three ancient languages.

When I came across the fairly common term 'polychromatic' recently, I found myself mentally translating it, as it were, into 'multi-coloured', and then again in to 'many-hued'. They all mean the same thing, but (one might say) in three different languages.

'Poly-', 'multi-' and 'many-' all mean the same in Greek, Latin and English respectively. Chrōma is Greek for English 'hue', and color is the Latin equivalent. Any apparent nuances of meaning derive from their association: 'polychrome' sounds rather technical and scientific; 'many-hued' sounds a little bit archaic, deliberately old-fashioned or poetical. It is the Latin derived 'multi-coloured' that now seems most neutral to us.

But how useful to have the choice !

Multilingual, polyglot and many-tongued