Comment by PeterCorless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterCorless | Hacker News Reader

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...

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).

> • Latin (including modern scientific and technical Latin): 28.24%;

This skews the numbers because there are thousands (probably tens of thousands) of scientific terms, names of species, etc., that probably shouldn't be counted here if you're looking at the origin of the language and that is because we continue to use Latin for new scientific terms or names of species today. In other words, they're not Latin words that have been absorbed into English, they're just Latin words period.

> 25% old Norse? That is almost certainly not correct.

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