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Comment by cestith | Hacker News Reader

The syntax has morphed from Germanic languages, but with Norman vocabulary. Norman was a dialect of French from before the standardization of l'Académie Française.

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Yes, and Norman was a "creole" of a Germanic language brought in by the viking conquest and French, which itself is a creole of a Celtic-based language and Latin (due to the conquest of France by romans). Celts and Vikings were already presents in the British islands. See [1] for the "genealogy" of European languages. So William the Conqueror brought to England more of the same things plus a few more (and the endemic mismatch of spelling and pronunciation I guess).

France is sort-of at the crossroads of Europe, so it's no surprise that there's a little bit of everything in the French language. This is particularly visible in place-names of Normandy [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indo-European_language...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_toponymy

Nah - there are two vocabularies, the 'posh' Norman French one, and the common western Germanic one. (There is also an admixture of Norse influence, so the combination of Old English (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians) with Old Norse then knocking the edges off. That probably did for grammatical gender.)

The Germanic core still generally gets used by all in high stress environments.

Latin and various forms of French are bigger contributors to overall vocabulary than German and Dutch. It does seem to me that much of the core vocabulary day to day or that would be used in a pidgin of English by word use frequency is more Germanic, but I personally don’t know of a study showing that.

And yes, certain situations do tend to favor the Germanic portions to include especially coarser words.

I was not referring to the well known 4 letter words used to describe parts of the anatomy. They merely get used for emphasis.

Under fight / violence / battle conditions, the active vocabulary is Germanic, and not lacking in expressive power, nor subject to misunderstanding.

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