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This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1] Some proper

This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1] Some properties of English's grammar are also more similar to Romance languages than Germanic ones. For example, whereas Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis". I'm not saying English is a Romance language. But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English

munificent 2y ago
> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios between the former and latter.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? I think he's measuring the first, which gives a skewed picture, the latter is why english is considered a germanic language. The core of the language is all germanic words and you can still get by reasonably well without using any of the french/latin additions. Generally if a word is smaller and less 'fancy' it's of germanic origins, if it's longer and 'fancier' it's probably of romance origins.
secretmark 2y ago
The most frequently used words are almost all Germanic. There are a lot of technical words with Latin or Greek etymologies that are hardly used in quotidian conversation.
- jonstewart 2y ago
  > quotidian iswydt
  - jachee 2y ago
    Don’t bring Welsh into this. ;)
patall 2y ago
Which 'aspect' is supposed to be missing in Germanic language verbs? Because I can say those three example forms (aspect tenses?) in both Swedish and German without any limitation.
- derdi 2y ago
  I think the parent was specifically referring to "I was playing", which in German would not be expressed using only forms of the verb. You would have to use an adverb, as in "ich spielte gerade". Or you could noun the verb: "ich war am Spielen".
  - riahi 2y ago
    Nit: isn’t “playing” itself “nouning the verb” via a gerund / participle construct? I actually am not sure of the subtleties on this grammatical point.
    - indigo945 2y ago
      "Ich war am Spielen" is not really Standard German. It's a West German/Ripuarian dialect form that people from that area sometimes use when conversing in Standard German. But yes, it does communicate the progressive aspect in the same manner that "I was playing" does in English. I agree that "nouning" the verb is an arbitrary distinction. Even if you want to give this one to German, English also has the prospective aspect, which is missing in German (prospective "I'm going to play tennis", vs. perfective "I will play tennis").
geocar 2y ago
> Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: What exactly do you mean by "aspect"? > there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis". Sure: -- (I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugué -- (When I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugaba -- (When I've) played (Tennis) ~~ jugado English (like German) might say they need auxiliary words to explain what's going on, and Spanish people might say they're just conjugating the verb differently, but I think this is just because things are written down; Because, if I say any of these sentences in Spanish or English rapidly enough, someone who does not know the language will not know where each word begins and ends, and it may just sound like English "conjugates" at the beginning of words and Spanish "conjugates" at the end. What's the real difference here? > But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why [English is] not considered a Romance language than you imply. I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a language, we're not really talking about something that will help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're really just yapping about geography and time. So what do you think would be different if English was more widely considered a Romance language?
- indigo945 2y ago
  I am referring to aspect in the sense that it's used in linguistics [1]. I'm honestly getting a lot of responses here from people who clearly don't have a good grasp of linguistics, but you take the cake by composing a long-form response without at least bothering to Google the terms I have used. I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a language, we're not really talking about something that will help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're really just yapping about geography and time. Language families are not just formed across geography and time. Genetically, Hindi is closer to French than it is to Tibetan. People move, you know. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect
- oefnak 2y ago
  You don't know what words are based on pauses, but whether you can rearrange them in a different sentence.
enragedcacti 2y ago
> This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1] I think that's complicated by the fact that many english words of latin origin were inherited from a germanic source and thus from an intelligibility standpoint the overlap between english and dutch or german is partially additive with latin. e.g. [1] Unfortunately the source is dead, but at one point a study ranked english/german as 60% lexical similarity compared to english/french at 27% [2]. Anecdotally, I think dutch and german are easier for an english speaker because of comparatively more overlap in simple words. Heavy use of compound words in dutch/german also gives an english listener a better chance of recognizing part of the word and inferring the meaning from context. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Latinates_of_Germanic_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Latinates_of_G... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity
tremon 2y ago
English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis". Where is the verb marking you speak of? Because I don't see any difference between played and played. Your example of how English uses auxiliary verbs to convey different verb aspects is a Germanic construct. I don't really understand how you use this as an example of Romance lineage in English.
- trealira 2y ago
  I think they're saying the difference is between "played" and "have played." The difference is more distinguished in other verbs, like "ate" vs "have eaten." The word "ate" is the past tense, and "eaten" is the participle. And it's different in that "have" implies some sort of connection to the present. You wouldn't say "When I was a kid, I have played a lot of video games." You'd say "When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games." I don't think this should imply a Romance connection, though, as Germanic languages do it, too. Using "have" and a participle seems like more of an areal feature to languages from Western Europe.
  - fch42 2y ago
    With respect to past tense, a "common" thing in english appears to be that the imperfect of a verb is the same word as the past particilpe of that verb. So "played" can be the imperfect tense itself, or the participle of perfect tense in "have played". In German, this doesn't happen. Imperfect tense is often formed by using a "-te" ending to the verb (so "spiel(en)" -> "spielte"), while the past participle prepends "ge-" and appends "t" or "en" (so "gespielt" - (I have) "played"). The form "... was playing" would also exist, "... war spielen", and again with a difference how the infinitive is formed (-ing vs. -en). To me, grammar of temporal forms in English is more Romance-language than German language. The fact that English lost any form of case, and most of gender, is neither German nor Romance though. I sometimes used to joke with English friends that the language is the least common denominator of all the people overrunning the Island in the last 3000 years. Use a bit of everything, leave all the hard stuff out, and write it in a nonphonetic way like Irish.
retrac 2y ago
> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by whom but it was once pointed out to me that in some genres - ranging from drinking songs to nursery rhymes - the words that come from Old English often make up more than 90% of the words. Similarly, if you sample the dialog in a kitchen or office while people gossip the ratio is also going to skew heavily like 70 - 80% Germanic. (Japanese shows a similar effect with all its Chinese vocabulary.) Indeed, it's not tricky to write about everyday grounded things with nothing but straight Anglo-Saxon roots. (I've been doing it so far this whole paragraph -- oh that's Greek.) Difficult to achieve similar results utilizing exclusively Latinate vocabulary. Of course, a history book or engineering manual will be different, and Graeco-Latin vocabulary might well be in the majority there.
type0 2y ago
> But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply. the language backbone is still Germanic

munificent 2y ago

> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios between the former and latter.

Suppafly 2y ago
>Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? I think he's measuring the first, which gives a skewed picture, the latter is why english is considered a germanic language. The core of the language is all germanic words and you can still get by reasonably well without using any of the french/latin additions. Generally if a word is smaller and less 'fancy' it's of germanic origins, if it's longer and 'fancier' it's probably of romance origins.

secretmark 2y ago

The most frequently used words are almost all Germanic. There are a lot of technical words with Latin or Greek etymologies that are hardly used in quotidian conversation.

jonstewart 2y ago
> quotidian iswydt
- jachee 2y ago
  Don’t bring Welsh into this. ;)

patall 2y ago

Which 'aspect' is supposed to be missing in Germanic language verbs? Because I can say those three example forms (aspect tenses?) in both Swedish and German without any limitation.

derdi 2y ago
I think the parent was specifically referring to "I was playing", which in German would not be expressed using only forms of the verb. You would have to use an adverb, as in "ich spielte gerade". Or you could noun the verb: "ich war am Spielen".
- riahi 2y ago
  Nit: isn’t “playing” itself “nouning the verb” via a gerund / participle construct? I actually am not sure of the subtleties on this grammatical point.
  - indigo945 2y ago
    "Ich war am Spielen" is not really Standard German. It's a West German/Ripuarian dialect form that people from that area sometimes use when conversing in Standard German. But yes, it does communicate the progressive aspect in the same manner that "I was playing" does in English. I agree that "nouning" the verb is an arbitrary distinction. Even if you want to give this one to German, English also has the prospective aspect, which is missing in German (prospective "I'm going to play tennis", vs. perfective "I will play tennis").

geocar 2y ago

> Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: What exactly do you mean by "aspect"? > there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis". Sure: -- (I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugué -- (When I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugaba -- (When I've) played (Tennis) ~~ jugado English (like German) might say they need auxiliary words to explain what's going on, and Spanish people might say they're just conjugating the verb differently, but I think this is just because things are written down; Because, if I say any of these sentences in Spanish or English rapidly enough, someone who does not know the language will not know where each word begins and ends, and it may just sound like English "conjugates" at the beginning of words and Spanish "conjugates" at the end. What's the real difference here? > But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why [English is] not considered a Romance language than you imply. I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a language, we're not really talking about something that will help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're really just yapping about geography and time. So what do you think would be different if English was more widely considered a Romance language?

indigo945 2y ago
I am referring to aspect in the sense that it's used in linguistics [1]. I'm honestly getting a lot of responses here from people who clearly don't have a good grasp of linguistics, but you take the cake by composing a long-form response without at least bothering to Google the terms I have used. I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a language, we're not really talking about something that will help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're really just yapping about geography and time. Language families are not just formed across geography and time. Genetically, Hindi is closer to French than it is to Tibetan. People move, you know. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect
oefnak 2y ago
You don't know what words are based on pauses, but whether you can rearrange them in a different sentence.

enragedcacti 2y ago

> This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1] I think that's complicated by the fact that many english words of latin origin were inherited from a germanic source and thus from an intelligibility standpoint the overlap between english and dutch or german is partially additive with latin. e.g. [1] Unfortunately the source is dead, but at one point a study ranked english/german as 60% lexical similarity compared to english/french at 27% [2]. Anecdotally, I think dutch and german are easier for an english speaker because of comparatively more overlap in simple words. Heavy use of compound words in dutch/german also gives an english listener a better chance of recognizing part of the word and inferring the meaning from context. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Latinates_of_Germanic_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Latinates_of_G... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

tremon 2y ago

English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis". Where is the verb marking you speak of? Because I don't see any difference between played and played. Your example of how English uses auxiliary verbs to convey different verb aspects is a Germanic construct. I don't really understand how you use this as an example of Romance lineage in English.

trealira 2y ago
I think they're saying the difference is between "played" and "have played." The difference is more distinguished in other verbs, like "ate" vs "have eaten." The word "ate" is the past tense, and "eaten" is the participle. And it's different in that "have" implies some sort of connection to the present. You wouldn't say "When I was a kid, I have played a lot of video games." You'd say "When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games." I don't think this should imply a Romance connection, though, as Germanic languages do it, too. Using "have" and a participle seems like more of an areal feature to languages from Western Europe.
- fch42 2y ago
  With respect to past tense, a "common" thing in english appears to be that the imperfect of a verb is the same word as the past particilpe of that verb. So "played" can be the imperfect tense itself, or the participle of perfect tense in "have played". In German, this doesn't happen. Imperfect tense is often formed by using a "-te" ending to the verb (so "spiel(en)" -> "spielte"), while the past participle prepends "ge-" and appends "t" or "en" (so "gespielt" - (I have) "played"). The form "... was playing" would also exist, "... war spielen", and again with a difference how the infinitive is formed (-ing vs. -en). To me, grammar of temporal forms in English is more Romance-language than German language. The fact that English lost any form of case, and most of gender, is neither German nor Romance though. I sometimes used to joke with English friends that the language is the least common denominator of all the people overrunning the Island in the last 3000 years. Use a bit of everything, leave all the hard stuff out, and write it in a nonphonetic way like Irish.

retrac 2y ago

> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by whom but it was once pointed out to me that in some genres - ranging from drinking songs to nursery rhymes - the words that come from Old English often make up more than 90% of the words. Similarly, if you sample the dialog in a kitchen or office while people gossip the ratio is also going to skew heavily like 70 - 80% Germanic. (Japanese shows a similar effect with all its Chinese vocabulary.) Indeed, it's not tricky to write about everyday grounded things with nothing but straight Anglo-Saxon roots. (I've been doing it so far this whole paragraph -- oh that's Greek.) Difficult to achieve similar results utilizing exclusively Latinate vocabulary. Of course, a history book or engineering manual will be different, and Graeco-Latin vocabulary might well be in the majority there.

type0 2y ago

> But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply. the language backbone is still Germanic