| ▲ | 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. | ||||||||
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