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According to one study, the percentage of modern English words derived from each of various language groups are as follows: * Latin (including scientific/medical/legal terms), ~29%; * French or Anglo-Norman, ~29%; * Germanic, ~26%; and * Others, ~16%.
A computerized survey of about 80,000 words in the third edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, published by Finkenstaedt and Wolff in 1973 estimated the origin of English words to be as follows:[8][9]
However, he found considerable discrepancy between the most common and least common words. The top thousand words were 83% of English origin, while the least common were only 25% of English origin.[6]
However, due to the variability of vocabulary of individuals, dialects, and time periods, exact percentages cannot be taken at face value.[3]
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Celtic words are almost absent but do exist, such as the word galore which came about in the 17th century and stems from the Irish, "go leor" which means plenty, or to sufficiency. [10] There are also dialectal words, such as the Yan Tan Tethera system of counting sheep. However, hypotheses have been made that English syntax was influenced by Celtic languages, such as the system of continuous tenses was a calque of similar Celtic phrasal structures. This is controversial, as the system has clear native English and other Germanic developments.
The French contributed legal, military, technological, and political terminology. French was the prestige language during the Norman occupation of the British Isles, causing many French words to enter English vocabulary.[11] Their language also contributed common words, such as how food was prepared: boil, broil, fry, roast, and stew, as well as words related to the nobility: prince, duke, marquess, viscount, baron, and their feminine equivalents.[12] Nearly 30 percent of English words (in an 80,000-word dictionary) are of French origin.
Most words in English that are derived from Latin are scientific and technical words, medical terminology, academic terminology, and legal terminology.
English words derived from Greek include scientific and medical terminology (for instance -phobias and -ologies), Christian theological terminology.
Norman
Castle, cauldron, kennel, catch, cater are among Norman words introduced into English. The Norman language also introduced (or reinforced) words of Norse origin such as mug.
There are many ways through which Dutch words have entered the English language: via trade and navigation, such as skipper (from schipper), freebooter (from vrijbuiter), keelhauling (from kielhalen); via painting, such as landscape (from landschap), easel (from ezel), still life (from stilleven); warfare, such as forlorn hope (from verloren hoop), beleaguer (from beleger), to bicker (from bicken); via civil engineering, such as dam, polder, dune (from duin); via the New Netherland settlements in North America, such as cookie (from koekie), boss from baas, Santa Claus (from Sinterklaas); via Dutch/Afrikaans speakers with English speakers in South Africa, such as wildebeest, apartheid, boer; via French words of Dutch/Flemish origin that have subsequently been adopted into English, such as boulevard (from bolwerk), mannequin (from manneken), buoy (from boei).[13][pageneeded]
There are many Italian words used in the English language relating to music such as piano, fortissimo, and legato, and Italian culture and politics, such as piazza, pizza, gondola, balcony, fascism. The English word umbrella comes from Italian ombrello.[citation needed]
English contains words relating to culture originating from the colonial era in India, e.g., atoll, avatar, bandana, bangles, buddy, bungalow, calico, candy, cashmere, chit, cot, curry, cushy, dinghy, guru, juggernaut, jungle, karma, khaki, lacquer, lilac, loot, mandarin, mantra, polo, pyjamas, shampoo, thug, tiffin, and verandah.
Words of Old Norse origin have entered English primarily from the contact between Old Norse and Old English during colonisation of eastern and northern England between the mid 9th to the 11th centuries (see also Danelaw). Many of these words are part of English core vocabulary, such as they, egg, sky or knife.[5]
Trade items such as borax, coffee, cotton, hashish, henna, mohair, muslin, saffron; Islamic religious terms such as jihad, Assassin, hadith, and sharia; scientific vocabulary borrowed into Latin in the 12th and 13th centuries (alcohol, alkali, algebra, azimuth, zenith, cipher, nadir); plants or plant products originating in tropical Asia and introduced to medieval Europe through Arabic intermediation (camphor, jasmine, lacquer, lemon, orange, sugar); Middle Eastern and Maghrebi cuisine words (couscous, falafel, hummus, kebab, tahini).
Counting
Cardinal numbering in English follows two models, Germanic and Italic. The basic numbers are zero through ten. The numbers eleven through nineteen follow native Germanic style, as do twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, and ninety.
Standard English, especially in very conservative formal contexts, continued to use native Germanic style as late as World War I for intermediate numbers greater than 20, viz., "one-and-twenty," "five-and-thirty," "seven-and-ninety," and so on. But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the Latin tradition of counting as "twenty-one," "thirty-five," "ninety-seven," etc., which is easier to say and was already common in non-standard regional dialects, gradually replaced the traditional Germanic style to become the dominant style by the end of nineteenth century.
Linguistic purism in the English language is the belief that words of native origin should be used instead of foreign-derived ones (which are mainly Romance, Latin and Greek). "Native" can mean "Anglo-Saxon" or it can be widened to include all Germanic words. In its mild form, it merely means using existing native words instead of foreign-derived ones (such as using "begin" instead of "commence"). In its more extreme form, it involves reviving native words that are no longer widely used (such as "ettle" for "intend") and/or coining new words from Germanic roots (such as word stock for vocabulary). This dates at least to the inkhorn term debate of the 16th and 17th century, where some authors rejected the foreign influence, and has continued to this day, being most prominent in Plain English advocacy to avoid Latinate terms if a simple native alternative exists.[14]
↑ I.e., excluded are words coming from the Germanic element in French, Latin or other Romance languages.[8][pageneeded]
Related Research Articles
Maltese is a Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic with Romance superstrata. It is spoken by the Maltese people and is the national language of Malta, and the only official Semitic and Afroasiatic language of the European Union. According to John L. Hayes, it descended from a North African dialect of Colloquial Arabic which was introduced to Malta when Arab and Berber (Aghlabids) invaders captured it in 869/870 CE. It is also said to have descended from Siculo-Arabic, which developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091. As a result of the Norman invasion of Malta and the subsequent re-Christianization of the islands, Maltese evolved independently of Classical Arabic in a gradual process of latinisation. It is therefore exceptional as a variety of historical Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. Maltese is thus classified separately from the 30 varieties constituting the modern Arabic macrolanguage. Maltese is also distinguished from Arabic and other Semitic languages since its morphology has been deeply influenced by Romance languages, namely Italian and Sicilian.
Middle English is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the University of Valencia states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly coincided with the High and Late Middle Ages.
A loanword is a word at least partly assimilated from one language into another language, through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term that is well established in the linguistic field despite its acknowledged descriptive flaws: nothing is taken away from the donor language and there is no expectation of returning anything.
In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new word or phrase (lexeme) in the target language. For instance, the English word skyscraper has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example Wolkenkratzer in German, arranha-céu in Portuguese, rascacielo in Spanish, grattacielo in Italian, gökdelen in Turkish, and matenrou (摩天楼) in Japanese.
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate the bulk of southern Great Britain. Their language originated as a group of Ingvaeonic languages which were spoken by the settlers in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic languages, and, possibly, British Latin, that had previously been dominant. Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant. A significant subsequent influence upon the shaping of Old English came from contact with the North Germanic languages spoken by the Scandinavian Vikings who conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the 8th and 9th centuries, which led to much lexical borrowing and grammatical simplification. The Anglian dialects had a greater influence on Middle English.
Frankish, also known as Old Franconian or Old Frankish, was the West Germanic language spoken by the Franks from the 5th to 10th centuries.
Purism in the linguistic field is the historical trend of languages to conserve intact their lexical structure of word families, in opposition to foreign influences which are considered 'impure'. Historically, English linguistic purism is a reaction to the great number of borrowings in the English language from other languages, especially Old French, since the Norman conquest of England, and some of its native vocabulary and grammar have been supplanted by features of Latinate and Greek origin. Efforts to remove or consider the removal of foreign terms in English are often known as Anglish, a term coined by author and humorist Paul Jennings in 1966.
Although English is a Germanic language, it has significant Latin influences. Its grammar and core vocabulary are inherited from Proto-Germanic, but a significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources. A portion of these borrowings come directly from Latin, but some also from Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; or from other languages into Latin and then into English. The influence of Latin in English, therefore, is primarily lexical in nature, being confined mainly to words derived from Latin and Greek roots.
In etymology, doublets are words in a given language that share the same etymological root. Doublets are often the result of loanwords being borrowed from other languages. While doublets may be synonyms, the characterization is usually reserved for words that have diverged significantly in meaning: for example, the English doublets pyre and fire are distinct terms with related meanings that both ultimately descend from the Proto-Indo-European word *péh₂ur.
Spanish is a Romance language which developed from Vulgar Latin in central areas of the Iberian Peninsula and has absorbed many loanwords from other Romance languages like French, Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, and Italian. Spanish also has lexical influences from Arabic and from Paleohispanic languages such as Iberian, Celtiberian and Basque.
The lexis of Bulgarian, a South Slavic language, consists of native words, as well as borrowings from Russian, French, and to a lesser extent English, Greek, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and other languages.
Many words that existed in Old English did not survive into Modern English. There are also many words in Modern English that bear little or no resemblance in meaning to their Old English etymons. Some linguists estimate that as much as 80 percent of the lexicon of Old English was lost by the end of the Middle English period, including many compound words, e.g. bōchūs, yet the components 'book' and 'house' were kept. Certain categories of words seem to have been more susceptible. Nearly all words relating to sexual intercourse and sexual organs as well as "impolite" words for bodily functions were ignored in favor of words borrowed from Latin or Ancient Greek. The Old English synonyms are now mostly either extinct or considered crude or vulgar, such as arse/ass.
The languages of Scotland belong predominantly to the Germanic and Celtic language families. The main language now spoken in Scotland is English, while Scots and Scottish Gaelic are minority languages. The dialect of English spoken in Scotland is referred to as Scottish English.
The vocabulary of the Icelandic language is heavily derived from and built upon Old Norse and contains relatively few loanwords; where these do exist their spelling is often heavily adapted to that of other Icelandic words.
Present-day Irish has numerous loanwords from English. The native term for these is béarlachas, from Béarla, the Irish word for the English language. It is a result of language contact and bilingualism within a society where there is a dominant, superstrate language and a minority substrate language with few or no monolingual speakers and a perceived "lesser" status.
The re-latinization of Romanian was the reinforcement of the Romance features of the Romanian language that happened in the 18th and 19th centuries. Romanian adopted a Latin-based alphabet to replace the Cyrillic script and borrowed many words from French as well as from Latin and Italian, in order to acquire the lexical tools necessary for modernization. This deliberate process coined words for recently introduced objects or concepts (neologisms), added Latinate synonyms for some Slavic and other loanwords, and strengthened some Romance syntactic features. Some linguistic researchers emphasize that the use of this term is inappropriate as it conflates the larger process of modernization of the language with the more extreme, and in the end unsuccessful, current of eliminating non-Latin influences, and, secondly, the term's lack of precision is susceptible to lead to confusion as the Latin character of the Romanian language had already been noticed since at least the 15th century.
1 2 Durkin, Philip (2014). Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English. OUP Oxford. p.22. ISBN978-0-19-957499-5. Percentages are often quoted for the proportions of the vocabulary of modern English that are borrowed from French, Latin, Scandinavian languages, etc. As discussed in chapter 1, such percentages must be approached with extreme caution. Firstly, we have to bear in mind that such figures can only refer to a particular period: the proportions in contemporary English will not at all be the same as those in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century English, for example. Secondly, we must consider whose English we are talking about, as discussed in section 1.5. Thirdly, once we have decided which registers, varieties, etc. we want to take into account, we have the practical problem of arriving at a wordlist. Fourthly, once we have our wordlist, we have the problem of assessing and classifying etymologies, i.e. deciding which words are borrowed and which are not. This last problem is a major concern of this book.
↑ McWhorter, John H. (2008). Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. New York: Gotham Books. pp.89–136. ISBN9781592403950.
1 2 Finkenstaedt, Thomas; Wolff, Dieter (1973). Ordered Profusion: Studies in Dictionaries and the English Lexicon. C. Winter. pp.26–37. ISBN3-533-02253-6.
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