While English is a Germanic language, 41% of English words (ranked by frequency) come from French, making French the largest source of words in English, not Ger

While English is a Germanic language, 41% of English words (ranked by frequency) come from French, making French the largest source of words in English, not German (which comes in at about 35%). Of course, removing all non-French words would be worse since English pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions are mostly German derived. According to Wikipedia, 97% of the top 100 words in English are German derived. The loss of German would leave little to "glue" a sentence together. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Word_origins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Word_origins