The English language descends from Old English, the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic. However, the percentage of loans in everyday conversation varies by dialect and idiolect, even if English vocabulary at large has a greater Romance influence.
The following are lists of words in the English language that are known as "loanwords" or "borrowings," which are derived from other languages.
This is a list of etymological lists.
Esperanto vocabulary and grammatical forms derive primarily from the Romance languages, with substantial contributions from Germanic languages. The language occupies a middle ground between "naturalistic" constructed languages such as Interlingua, which borrow words en masse from their source languages with little internal derivation, and a priori conlangs such as Solresol, in which the words have no historical connection to other languages. In Esperanto, root words are borrowed and retain much of the form of their source language, whether the phonetic form or orthographic form. However, each root can then form dozens of derivations which may bear little resemblance to equivalent words in the source languages, such as registaro (government), which is derived from the Latinate root reg but has a morphology closer to German or Russian.
Folk etymology – also known as (generative) popular etymology, analogical reformation, (morphological)reanalysis and etymological reinterpretation – is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one through popular usage. The form or the meaning of an archaic, foreign, or otherwise unfamiliar word is reinterpreted as resembling more familiar words or morphemes.
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, or through one of the Romance languages, particularly Anglo-Norman and French, 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.
"Uncleftish Beholding" (1989) is a short text by Poul Anderson, first published in the Mid-December 1989 issue of the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact and included in his anthology "All One Universe". It is designed to illustrate what English might look like without its large number of words derived from languages such as French, Greek, and Latin, especially with regard to the proportion of scientific words with origins in those languages.
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.
