The bastard vocabulary of English

A. The dictionary experience. We English speakers are accustomed to finding that words in our language trace to Dutch, Greek, French, Latin, and other languages. It is almost the unexpected case that a word will simply trace directly back to Old English. Yet the Pole, for example, finds that many more of the words in his language proportionately trace back to Proto-Slavic.

B. Indeed, out of all of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, no less than 99 percent were taken from other languages. The relative few that trace back to Old English itself are also 62 percent of the words most used, such as and, but, father, love, fight, to, will, should, not, from, and so on. Yet the vast majority of our vocabulary originated in foreign languages, including not merely the obvious “Latinate” items, like adjacent, but common, mundane forms not processed by us as “continental” in the slightest.

C. For example, every single word in that last sentence longer than three letters originated outside of English itself!

D. Main sources of borrowed words in English.

1. Vikings. Vikings invaded and settled in the northern half of Britain starting in 787; they spoke Old Norse (ancestor of today’s Scandinavian languages) and scattered about a thousand words into English, including such staples as both, same, again, get, give, are, skirt, sky, and skin.

2. Normans. In 1066, French speakers took over England for roughly the next 200 years and introduced no fewer than about 7,500 words, including such ordinary words as air, coast, debt, face, flower, joy, people, river, sign, blue, clear, easy, large, mean, nice, poor, carry, change, cry, move, push, save, trip, wait, chair, lamp, pain, stomach, fool, music, park, beef, stew, toast, spy, faith, bar, jail, tax, and fry that hardly feel “foreign” to us now.

3. Latin. The “Latinate” layer, most perceptible to us as a word class apart, came after the withdrawal of the French, with the increasing use of English as a language of learning—hence, client, legal, scene, intellect, recipe, pulpit, exclude, necessary, tolerance, interest, et alia.

E. Thus, an English that had developed without these lexical invasions would be incomprehensible and peculiar to us. For this reason, Icelanders can read literature in their language from the 1300s and Hebrew speakers can tackle Biblical Hebrew, but Beowulf is opaque to us.

F. Advantages and disadvantages.

1. Advantage. Because English is so larded with Latin and French words, we have a good head start on learning the vocabularies of French and other languages descended from Latin. This is especially true of the more formal layers of these languages, because most of our words from French and Latin entered “from above,” contributed by rulers and scientists. Association, opportunité, and présent give us little trouble.

2. Disadvantage. Because so little of the Old English rootstock remains in English, there is no other language that is close enough to ours to be especially easy to learn, as Portuguese is for Spaniards, Zulu is for Xhosa speakers, and so on. Thus, if a language does not have the Latinate inheritance that Western European languages do, then we must learn both its humble and its formal vocabulary from the ground up. Russian’s “bread,” “water,” and “fish” are xleb, voda, and ryba; its “association,” “opportunity,” and “the present” are soedinenje, vozmožnost, and nastojaščee.

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