The Great Christmas Debate

@Olivier5,

He must have had a whale of a time.

0 Replies

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Since an overwhelming majority of French words have Latin antecedents, the thousands of French words borrowed by English since the 12th century have overwhelmingly Latin antecedents... Example:

In your link, the Latin verb Bibo/Bibere is given as the antecedent of Beverage, but the REAL DIRECT antecedent of it is old French Bevrage (now Breuvage), which ITSELF comes from Latin Bibere. Clear? You are attributing to Latin words that actually came from French.

OK. So the word originally came from the Latin but then the French changed it and it ended up in English. That means you can't deny the Latin origin. You can only agree that it came from BOTH.

1 Reply

@parados,

All languages come from other languages so ultimately, we all speak indo-european. But those words came into English in a form that is still today recognizingly French.

2 Replies

@neologist,

Yule is attested early in the history of the Germanic peoples; from the 4th century Gothic language it appears in the month name fruma jiuleis, and, in the 8th century, the English historian Bede wrote that the Anglo-Saxon calendar included the months geola or giuli corresponding with either modern December or December and January.
In Scandinavia it is spelled jul.

0 Replies

@Olivier5,

Nobody is disputing the influence of French on English, you're just exaggerating that influence.

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

No I am not. And I think you are unaware of its full extent.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Yes, but let's go back to your original claim that 50% of English came from French. That is completely bogus. You tried to defend it by claiming the Latin influence was only in the sciences so you wanted to eliminate the Latin influenced words completely. The fact that many common words exist that came from the Latin makes your claim false.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

You're like the French version of this bloke.

0 Replies

@parados,

If one excludes purely scientific, medical and legal terms like hypothalamus and the likes, then French represents close to half of the remaining English words. I don't think it's exactly 50% but something like 40 o 45%, on a par with German origins. English is a Franco-Germanic language.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Where did you learn math?

Quote:

According to surveys,[1][2] the percentage of modern English words derived from each language group are as follows:
Latin (including words used only in scientific / medical / legal contexts) ≈29%
French ≈29%
Germanic ≈26%
Greek ≈6%
Others ≈10%

If you exclude ALL words of Latin origin you barely get to 40%. I doubt you are going to argue that ALL words or Latin origin are scientific, medical and legal terms. Wait, let me rephrase that, I'll bet you will argue that all words of Latin origin are scientific, medical and legal terms.

Let me put this another way, 30% of the English language is not scientific, medical and legal jargon based on Latin. Only a fool would make such a claim. Certainly you understand "fool" since it comes from the French.

1 Reply

@parados,

Good point. 29/71= 41% so assuming a few common Latin words like etc., French accounts for the etymology of about 40% of all English non-scientific words.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Good point. 29/71= 41% so assuming a few common Latin words like etc., French accounts for the etymology of about 40% of all English non-scientific words.

Good God, you are just going to insist on being a complete idiot. No one in their right mind thinks that 30% of the English language is scientific jargon. I think we could agree that French might have contributed 30-35% of our current non scientific vocabulary but no way is it 40%.

2 Replies

@parados,

By the way, the OED has over 600,000 words and doesn't include many proper names, scientific and technical terms, and jargon as a matter of editorial policy.

The Oxford Latin Dictionary has only 40,000 Latin words in it.
http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Latin-Dictionary-Dictionaries/dp/0199580316

0 Replies

@parados,

Quote:

About

TheScienceDictionary.org is the most trusted science resource on the internet created for scientists and academics by scientists and academics. Our team of PhD's, Masters students and scientists bring you the most authoritative science dictionary ever created online and is free to use. There are over 38,000 terms defined in the dictionary.

[...] Recent Terms
VITELLIGENOUS
LUTEIN CELLS
VERMIFORM
SYNERGIC
XYLOTOMOUS

http://thesciencedictionary.org/about/#ixzz2nV7yrazi

2 Replies

@Olivier5,

That funny thing about math is that 38,000 isn't close to 30% of 600,000.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Lets for the sake of argument say that the most complete science term dictionary only has 1/2 of the scientific terms and every single one of those science terms is Latin in origin. (A rather silly assumption but we will make it.)

That means there are 76,000 Latin terms used in science medicine etc. Those terms would not be in the OED so we add them to the words total of the OED.

That gives us roughly 676,000 words in the English language. Of that using our silly assumption 76,000 of them are scientific terms that you want to exclude.

76,000/676,000 = 11.2%

That means 88.8% of English words are not Latin scientific terms. We know that 29% of all English words are of French origin.

.29 /.888 = 32.6% .

So with a liberal assumption French makes up about 33% of the English language. Now can you put your stupid claim to rest and stop trying to pretend it is true?

0 Replies

@parados,

According to wiki, the Oxford English Dictionary lists over 250,000 distinct words. Anyway, these numbers are surreal. How many do normal people actually know, in practice? Say a learned English academic knows what, 30,000 words?

2 Replies

Quote:

The history of English
Five Events that Shaped the History of English
Philip Durkin, Principal Etymologist at the Oxford English Dictionary, chooses five events that shaped the English Language.

[...] 1066 and after

The centuries after the Norman Conquest witnessed enormous changes in the English language. In the course of what is called the Middle English period, the fairly rich inflectional system of Old English broke down. It was replaced by what is broadly speaking, the same system English has today, which unlike Old English makes very little use of distinctive word endings in the grammar of the language. The vocabulary of English also changed enormously, with tremendous numbers of borrowings from French and Latin, in addition to the Scandinavian loanwords already mentioned, which were slowly starting to appear in the written language. [...]

Trilingualism in English, French, and Latin was common in the worlds of business and the professions, with words crossing over from one language to another with ease. You only have to flick through the etymologies of any English dictionary to get an impression of the huge number of words entering English from French and Latin during the later medieval period. This trend was set to continue into the early modern period with the explosion of interest in the writings of the ancient world.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/the-history-of-english

0 Replies

@Olivier5,

According to the OED they have over 600,000
http://www.oed.com/

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/05/vocabulary-size

It looks like the average native English speaker has a vocabulary of 30,000. Top 10% have almost 40,000.

1 Reply

The Great Christmas Debate

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know