ABSTRACT
The five senses are among the few native English words that we use every day. Smell comes from the Old English smyllan; taste comes from the Middle English tasten; hear comes from the Old English hieren; touch comes from the Middle English touchen; and see comes from the Old English seon. Words for objects or concepts that are physically closest to us, or that have to do directly with our personal being, tend to stay our own in origin. Why is that? If English is so willing to adopt or borrow foreign words, such as those for medicine, why do certain categories of words remain our own after hundreds of years of mixing with foreign languages?
