Germanic, Romance and Greek vocabulary

English is a West Germanic language, related closely to the other West Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Frisian and Afrikaans) and less closely to the North Germanic languages (Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faeroese). On the other hand, England was ruled for a long period after 1066 by a monarch and a nobility whose native language was a variety of French; and even though this ruling group gradually switched to English for everyday purposes, French remained in use much longer as a language of law and administration, and longer still as a language of culture that every educated person was expected to learn. It is not surprising, then, that the vocabulary of English contains a high proportion of words borrowed from French – a much higher proportion than in the other Germanic languages.

French is one of the so-called Romance languages, descended from Latin, along with Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Provençal, Romansh (spoken in Switzerland), Italian (with its many diverse dialects), and Romanian. Most words borrowed from French therefore come from Latin indirectly. But Latin has had a more direct influence too. Three thousand years ago it was spoken only in a small area around Rome, but by AD 400 it was the official language of the western half of the Roman Empire and the vehicle of a huge and varied written literature, second only to Greek and far outweighing in scope and variety any other written literature in Europe until well after the invention of printing. It was also the liturgical language of all West European Christians until the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, and remained the predominant liturgical language of Catholics worldwide until the 1970s. As a language of scholarly publication, it survived in use until the eighteenth century (for example, Sir Isaac Newton published in Latin his work on physics and astronomy). The study of Latin was still a routine part of what was considered a ‘good education’ throughout the English-speaking world until the second half of the twentieth century. So, particularly after the Renaissance, or revival of learning, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is not surprising that many words were adopted into English from Latin directly, rather than by way of French.

The Romans revered Greek culture, and most of classical Latin literature emulates Greek models. However, the Latin of classical (pre-Christian) literature did not use many Greek words, the Romans preferring instead to create new Latin terms to translate Greek ones. Latin borrowings from Greek increased after the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Empire in the fourth century. The possibility of direct Greek influence on English did not arise, however, until Western Europeans began to learn about Greek culture for themselves in the fifteenth century. (This revival of interest was stimulated partly by a westward migration of Greek scholars from Constantinople, later called Istanbul, after it was captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.) From the point of view of word formation, the main influence of Greek has been in its use in the invention of scientific and technical words, and many of the bound combining forms are Greek in origin.

The variety of the sources that have contributed to the vocabulary of English accounts for the existence of many pairs or groups of words that are descended, in whole or in part, from the same ancestral morpheme in the extinct Proto-Indo-European language from which Greek and the Romance and Germanic languages are descended – words that are thus cognate, in the terminology of historical linguistics – but that have reached their contemporary English form by a variety of routes, through direct inheritance or through borrowing at different times. An example is the Proto-Indo-European root from which the English word heart is descended. Regular sound changes have affected this root in all those languages that preserve it, so in Latin it shows up as cord- (a bound root, as the hyphen indicates). In French this becomes cœur, from which was formed a derivative courage, with a metaphorical meaning (‘heart, disposition’). Courage was borrowed into English around 1300, and is attested with its modern sense in 1375. However, around 1400 the same root was borrowed again, in its Latin shape, in the word cordial, with the meaning ‘belonging to the heart’ and later ‘warm, friendly’. Yet a fourth version of this root appears in cardiac, borrowed around 1600 from the Greek word kardiakós ‘pertaining to the heart’, which displays the root in its Greek guise kard-.

Another Indo-European root that has reached modern English vocabulary through three distinct sources of borrowing as well as by direct inheritance is the root from which the verb bear is derived. This shows up in Latin as fer- and in Greek as pher-, both meaning ‘carry’. These appear in modern English, the former as the bound root in verbs such as confer, and latter in the name Christopher, which originates in the legend of a saint who carried Christ across a river. But English has also acquired the root via French, in suffer, corresponding to modern French souffrir. (The difference in stress between confer and suffer is a clue that one has reached English via a ‘learned’ route, directly from Latin, while the other has come via medieval spoken French.)

A striking feature of these words is that the inherited Germanic forms, heart and bear, are free, whereas in the forms borrowed from Latin, French or Greek the cognate roots are bound. This highlights an important morphological difference between inherited and borrowed words. In borrowing these words, English speakers borrowed not only the roots and affixes that they contain but also the pattern of word formation that they conform to – a pattern which does not allow roots to appear naked, so to speak, unaccompanied by some derivational or inflectional affix. Admittedly, some borrowed roots are free, and a few inherited ones are bound. It is still true, however, that most of the roots that are bound in all contexts (that is, most of the roots that have no free allomorphs) do not belong to the vocabulary that English has inherited from its Proto-Germanic ancestor