| ▲ | PeterCorless 14 hours ago | |
French is actually <30%. There is a well-sourced Wikipedia article about this. • French (including Old French: 11.66%; Anglo-French: 1.88%; and French: 14.77%): 28.30%; • Latin (including modern scientific and technical Latin): 28.24%; • Germanic languages (including Old English, Proto-Germanic and others: 20.13%; • Old Norse: 1.83%; Middle English: 1.53%; Dutch: 1.07%; excluding Germanic words borrowed from a Romance language): 25%;[a] • Greek: 5.32%; • no etymology given: 4.04%; • derived from proper names: 3.28%; and • all other languages: less than 1% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-language_influences_in... Also, one could argue French itself is an agglomeration of Vulgar Latin (87%) as well as its own Frankish Germanic roots (10%), and a few of Gaulish and Breton Celtic origin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_German... | ||
| ▲ | umanwizard 13 hours ago | parent [-] | |
It is not straightforward to define a metric like this. What counts as an "English word" ? There are books full of the scientific names of plant and animal species, which usually come from Latin; do these count as "English words" ? What's the cutoff? IMO, a much better metric is frequency-weighted; that is, taking some corpus of real English and counting the words in it, rather than weighting "every English word" with the value 1. If you do this frequency-weighted analysis, Old English is far ahead of French and Latin combined (especially in colloquial speech; they're closer in formal writing). | ||