4 ms·
At least 3: ~26% Germanic ~29% Latin ~29% French ~16% Other RobWords covers this really well: https://youtu.be/PCE4C9GvqI0?si=4Wd6NFus4v1YqmC3 https://yout
by aeonik 1y ago
At least 3:
~26% Germanic
~29% Latin
~29% French
~16% Other
RobWords covers this really well:
https://youtu.be/PCE4C9GvqI0?si=4Wd6NFus4v1YqmC3 https://youtu.be/PCE4C9GvqI0?si=4Wd6NFus4v1YqmC3
- zahlman 1y agoIt seems hard to measure with any kind of objectivity here, considering how much Latin is in French (and even modern German) as well.
- School-Cotton 1y agoThat might be true if you just count up every word in the dictionary by origin. However if you weight the words by frequency, Germanic will be way higher. That is, if you take a transcript of an average conversation in English, the proportion of words inherited from Old English (i.e., Germanic) will be much higher than 26%.
- throaway955 1y agoAlmost all the most used words in English are Germanic. Latin in particular is overrpresented because of scientific and technical terms which are rarely used.