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He said it himself: > English is one good candidate for this elite club. Thanks primarily to the Normans, English has been inundated with words of a Latinate o

• vidarh 3y ago
  While the bulk go back to the Normans, there were also subsequent significant waves of French and Latin influence on the English lexicon, so many of the most obvious similarities are much newer. E.g. English imported another ~10k or more Latin words during the English Renaissance. Including the word "lexicon". Then another wave of Latin influence via scientific discovery in the 17th and 18th centuries creating a need for new terms while Latin and Greek conferred greater cachet (from French to Scottish English around 1630) / prestige (French, from Latin) / status (Latin) over creating new "native" words. Of course helped by them being common languages for scientists to have a certain familiarity with, and sometimes fluency in. It's particularly fascinating when you find relatively closely related words imported in different waves or from different sources (like cachet, prestige, status), whether because of nuances or perhaps differences in perceived status, or sometimes because the meaning has diverged from the original borrowing. [Not a linguist by any means, but speak multiple Germanic and Romance languages so the differences and similarities always fascinate me and English still seems like a horrific mishmash, so I spend a disproportionate amount of time learning enough about etymology to make stupid mistakes]