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dfawcus 14 hours ago

Nah - there are two vocabularies, the 'posh' Norman French one, and the common western Germanic one. (There is also an admixture of Norse influence, so the combination of Old English (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians) with Old Norse then knocking the edges off. That probably did for grammatical gender.)

The Germanic core still generally gets used by all in high stress environments.

cestith 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Latin and various forms of French are bigger contributors to overall vocabulary than German and Dutch. It does seem to me that much of the core vocabulary day to day or that would be used in a pidgin of English by word use frequency is more Germanic, but I personally don’t know of a study showing that.

And yes, certain situations do tend to favor the Germanic portions to include especially coarser words.

dfawcus 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I was not referring to the well known 4 letter words used to describe parts of the anatomy. They merely get used for emphasis.

Under fight / violence / battle conditions, the active vocabulary is Germanic, and not lacking in expressive power, nor subject to misunderstanding.