George Orwell wrote an essay on the English language in which he praised its ability to do two important thing at the same time, something all good languages must do: to make a point clearly, or, alternately, to make it obscure. He traced this to the language's two roots, one Germanic, and the other from Latin via the romance languages. As an example, look at my first sentence. The word clear is of Germanic origin; its pronunciation is abrupt and oddly powerful; as an adjective, it conveys an immediate image of, well, clarity. The word obscure, however, is of Latin origin; it's soft, not particularly powerful, and, as Orwell noted, such Latin words tend to fall over facts and hide them as under a layer of snow.
Being an almost equal mixture of two older languages, English has two words for almost anything, the Germanic word being generally more powerful, the Latin word generally seeming softer and perhaps more cultured. Going back to the two examples above, I might say a thing is clear, or lucid, or I might say a thing is obscure, or dark. Both sets of adjectives technically have the same meaning, but Orwell's point was that their different effects make English an unusually flexible language.