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Comment by goldenarm | Hacker News Reader

It's hilarious that most of these words are French

English has this weird dichotomy where most of the words in a typical sentence are Germanic, while most of the words in the dictionary are French.

Fun fact: according to a quick count by AI using web search, the previous sentence contains 21 words of Germanic origin, 2 of Latin origin, 2 of Greek origin and 1 of French origin. Also the etymology of the word Germanic is Latin, while that of the word French is Germanic

Yes, English is a post-Hastings collision between Norman French and Anglo Saxon.

Norman French due to the Norman invasion of 1066 resulting in Old English evolving into Middle English. You can see that in the words for animals vs meats (cow and boef/beef, sheep and mutton, etc.) where the Germanic people raised the sheep and the Norman aristocracy ate them.

A lot of the more common and simpler words are Germanic, as is the grammar (e.g. compound words like cupboard).

Depends is bratwurst a German word or an English one? You will hard pressed to find an American that doesn’t know thr word and what it means. You can buy them at just about any grocery store and they are a staple of many restaurants.

At some point the word becomes both. Sourced from its mother language and maybe even still meaning the same thing in both, but no less an English word than any other at this point.

It also had "weltschmerz" in the list, but I think I have only ever heard "ennui" used in English. They are both foreign words, but I would not have thought of weltschmerz as a loan word. Then again, maybe I am not reading the right texts.

Bratwurst is still a German word. It doesn't become English just because it's used by native English speakers. If you start to tweak it a bit, it could become an English word. Like "fish" vs. "Fisch" in German. Or "good" vs. "gut" in German.

True. I'm French native but my English is better (educated in Australia) so this created a weird situation for me where I got 14/20 for advanced words and 19/20 for expert words.

To be fair, I think I messed up a few advanced words by accident but I think the general pattern would hold because many of the expert level words seemed to have French root. So it felt like it got easier towards the end for me. Grandmaster words were a bit weirder on the whole.

I'm an engineer and read mostly non-fiction so this probably explains the gap too.

They are not. Quite a few have Latin roots and the like that corresponding French words share.

Approximately 0.0% of those came into English through Latin, while around 100% came through Norman French.

Latin was commonly spoken amongst the educated at one time (served as a lingua franca across Europe) and used for religion and scientific discourse for even longer.

That depends on when and how they entered English. A lot of scientific vocab was taken directly from Latin and Greek.

French english speakers usually have a quite good vocabulary. Getting to the point of speaking english is a milestone that's quite difficult for french speakers though.

English is the PHP of human languages.

I'm not sure PHP deserved that...

That's harsh, English is a mess but PHP is worse.

Modern PHP, while not great, is mostly okay really. Old PHP I'd rate as worse than English.

English also has a ridiculously high fraction of Latin too.

Not from Latin but through French - the direct use of Latin in English is generally restricted to technical jargon and legal terms (that English often also share with the French.)

Latin isn't really any sort of parent to Old English afaik, even though the Romans ran Britain for a while.

In order to stunt on the pors, English borrowed a fair amount of Latin and Greek directly - especially in law, philosophy, and the sciences.

And French in turn was influenced a lot from Latin. Which means a lot of the French loan words have their origin in Latin. And of course Latin is actively used to this day in the Catholic church and the Church of England. Latin was widely used for written communication for quite some time. Most people couldn't read or write. But that impacted a lot of religious, scientific, legal, etc. communication and words. English also has a lot of loan words from other languages. Lots of nautical terms have an obvious Dutch origin, for example.

It's not just influence: French descended from Vulgar Latin, with a lot of influence first from the Gaulish (Celtic) substrate and then from the Frankish (Germanic) conquerors.

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