Timeline for How many English words are of native origin?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 9 at 13:34 | comment | added | Stuart F | There are various lists of most common 100 words but people (61st or 62nd) is Romance, as are use and because (from cause) further down. | |
| Aug 8 at 2:23 | answer | added | Laurel♦ | timeline score: 1 | |
| Aug 8 at 1:30 | comment | added | GEdgar | Related. I heard once that, of the 100 most common words of English, all are of Germanic origin; while in the second 100 there are also many words of Romance origin. (But it was long ago that I heard this.) | |
| Aug 8 at 0:36 | answer | added | Leo | timeline score: -1 | |
| Apr 8, 2020 at 18:26 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | @Juhasz I bet they didn't make nearly as many types as us civilised typos. | |
| Apr 8, 2020 at 15:59 | comment | added | Juhasz | @EdwinAshworth, yes that was truley the Bell Epoque of English culture. (Sorry, that was terrible). | |
| Apr 8, 2020 at 14:12 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | @Juhasz Then (or rather previously), ther'e Beakerspeak. | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 20:52 | comment | added | EmaJ | I guess I'm just asking how many English words currently in use come from Old English. I tried doing the math myself. The best I could find was Wikipedia's list of Anglo-Saxon rooted words, which had a total of about 4,000 entries. Most sources estimate English to have about 170,000. So I did 4,000/170,000 and that came out to about 2.4%. Now that doesn't seem quite right to me, so I'm thinking Wikipedia's list does not include all such words, but I have no way of checking at the moment. If anyone could point me to a source where I can verify this, that would be much appreciated. | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 18:55 | comment | added | Juhasz | Seems a little odd to call Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) "native" since it replaced the Celtic languages spoken by the "native" inhabitants of Briton (who themselves only arrived there in the 6th century BCE). Even Latin speakers had been in Briton for a few hundred years before the Anglo-Saxons took over. And thus, Old English itself contains loans from Latin, a few from Celtic, and some from Old Norse. On top of that, the Angles and Saxons had already borrowed Latin words before leaving continental Europe. The point is, how would you define an authentically Anglo-Saxon word? | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 18:36 | answer | added | Edwin Ashworth | timeline score: 4 | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 18:30 | review | First posts | |||
| Apr 7, 2020 at 20:22 | |||||
| Apr 7, 2020 at 18:26 | history | asked | EmaJ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |