Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.
The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary. The length of the German dictionary is irrelevant because: Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte
It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.
I remember the "History of English Podcast" covering a lot of this. I'm more a programming language nerd than spoken language, but I still found it fascinating.
Old English was a Germanic language, later heavily influenced by Norman/French vocabulary. French of course descended from Latin, and Latin and Germanic languages both belong to the Indo-European family of languages. (The "C" language of humanity, if you will.)
French was forcibly thrust on the population in 1066, but of course the conquerors were the elite, and the defeated, their servants. So if you tend a cow, you call it with the Germanic word: cow, not vache. But if you consume its expensive meat, you name it in French: boef / beef, not rind(fleisch).
Careful: English is just as Germanic as German is. It's easy to conflate "German" with Proto-Germanic and create the incorrect assumption that English evolved from German, when both languages share a common ancestor as part of the West Germanic family of languages.
English has certainly diverged quite a lot, but there are other ways it stayed the same and German diverged; for example, the infamous "th" sounds were at one time common to all Germanic speakers, but was lost among mainland Germanic speakers while English (as well as Icelandic) kept it.
No, because unlike Germany, England was for hundreds of years ruled by a nobility that was French speaking (until English emerged from a blend of French and Old English (which was Germanic).
You could certainly make the case that English is not a Germanic language. You would be in contradiction with the linguistic mainstream, who recognize a direct lineage between Old English, Middle English and Modern English. You would also be placing much import on the influence of loanwords on a language, enough so that the presence of such would divorce the victim language from its linguistic family entirely!
One interesting observation is that French-derived words in English tend to be fancier -- formal, sophisticated, higher-class -- while Germanic ones tend to be more casual, everyday vocabulary.
Many of these words transferred during the Norman Conquest. During that time, England was ruled by French speakers. The upper class and nobility in England were French (and French speakers).
When someone in the upper class wanted boeuf, they wanted the meat of a cow - not the cow itself. And so beef entered the English language as the meat. This extended to other animals. In general, the word for the meat in English is the French word for the animal and the word for the animal is derived from the German word.
This also extended to the language law and things that the upper classes (rather than the commoners) dealt with. When the common English (germanic) did have to deal with those topics, they used the French words and those words were brought into English.
English is 0% German other than loanwords like "zeitgeist".
What is more accurate to say is that English and German descend from a common ancestor: Proto-Germanic. Saying English descended from German would be just as wrong as saying German descended from English.
The fact that "German" and "Germanic" sound similar does not mean that they are the same thing, nor that modern standard German is somehow the official representative of the Germanic languages.
IIRC the reason that the family got the name "Germanic" is basically that it was some Germans that came up with the idea. I'm having trouble sourcing this though.
Last I heard was that the German tribe the language group was named after weren't even germanic soeakers. Like the fact that the Franks were a germanic speaking tribe who abandoned their language for the local dialect of latin which become French.
The romans called the area Germania after the germani that lived there. Germani is believed to be a celtic word though. So it's possible that the original Germani were actual celtic speakers. Which is another branch of old indo-european.
> Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.
The article claims different proportions: "Half of all English vocabulary comes from those three Romance roots, compared to less than a third that comes from Germanic sources."
Still only half correct, but based of those proportions it is more correct than claiming English is a Germanic language.
It's not clear where the quite significant remaining proportion of the English language comes from. Colonial languages?
The real point of the essay discussed in the article is that the French origin of (part of) the English language is Norman French, which was distinctly different from Parisian French and has pretty much vanished from Normandy since. So the argument is that English might be as close to Norman French as French is. The influence of Norman French on the English language was downplayed for political reasons, argues the author.
Ultimately words of Germanic origins might be fewer but more frequently used. The grammar is also potentially closer to the Germanic origins than to the French ones? Let the linguists debate this forever I guess.
I don't know how much truth there is to this, but I've heard a story about the difference in French/Germanic word usage may stem from inequalities from the Norman invasion - the masters were speaking French, and the common folk were doing the dirty work speaking old English derived from germanic languages. So, the masters were dealing with the finished product with French words - beef, pork, mutton, veal, venison, poultry - and the commoners were dealing with animals with Germanic words - cow, pig, sheep, deer, chicken, etc
> German dictionary is irrelevant because: Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte
English has compound nouns too, you know: "Coffee table", "finance department", "wine cellar".
German dictionaries have very similar rules for including them as English dictionaries; they tend to include them when there's a common use that isn't immediately clear.
If it gets to the dictionary, English often has a corresponding word as well: "Handschuh" -> "glove", "Zahnarzt" -> "dentist", "Hausaufgabe" -> "homework", "Fussball" -> "football" (or soccer if you're American or Australian), "Sonnenbrille" -> "Sunglasses". Note that the last 3 have basically the same morphology as their corresponding English words.
Don't fall for the divisive trolling... many places teach all three languages as part of the grade school curriculum. French is less concise structurally, German has phoneme that are difficult to pronounce, and English was derived from centuries of merging in countless trading partner pop cultures.
The reason English is difficult to learn is many generation 2 languages words are no longer directly correlated with the original meanings. There were even writers that made fun of what English would sound like to an unbiased observer. Don't ask your LLM "is there a Seahorse emoji"... =3
> The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary....
> It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.
It's kind of like in genetics: if a gene gets duplicated, it creates the opportunity for one copy to evolve to do something else. Likewise with language: having two words for the same thing allows their meanings to diverge without loss to cover more shades of meaning.
As a native French speaker who reads a lot of English I can attest that the vocabulary thing is very real and quite annoying when you try to translate stuff.
There are many words that are just inexistant in French and a pain in the ass to translate conceptually even using multiple words (and/or composed).
Most Frenchs are incredulous about this because they somehow think their lang is the best thing around.
English does not descend from Latin. It descends from Old English, a language that is entirely unrelated to Latin besides both being Indo-European, and has been influenced to a substantial degree by Norman French (which does descend from Latin) since the 11th century.
At least that is the conventional view. Apparently, according to this author, it actually descends from French. But that is a very fringe take.
The author does not actually make this claim, he only does tongue in cheek to show that Norman has a much larger influenced on the evolution of English vocabulary than usually thought.
This is right on point. I read this book recently, by coincidence, and it's funny and fascinating at the same time (at least for someone who speaks both English and French).
I see the French have been very busy with articles such as this.
Clearly an attempt to take the shine off of "that sub language english" which keeps pestering their ears.
From what I was repeatedly taught by my English, english teacher, all the latin loanwords came from when the Romans were hanging around the Isles. "They left more than walls!", she'd say.
Take care now, lest her ghost rise from the grave to correct your slanders against her beloved english.
French had several hundred years of established literary tradition when English was still 'descending'.
Not that it matters, given that we are talking about this in English, which has become the lingua franca in an amusing twist of fate, thanks to the East India Company.
Beowulf, the earliest major work of English literature, is from somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries. French certainly did not have "several hundred years of established literary tradition" by that time, even if you pick the latter date.
La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) is dated to between 1129 and 1165. It resembles modern French much more than Beowulf resembles modern English. Few English speakers today could read Beowulf.
This is a great example of moving the goalposts re the original (false) point that a previous comment made about French having a longer literary history than English.
If you’ve got a specific agenda, say x > y, you can be very selective about success criteria to suit yourself.
In this particular case of English and French, the reality is that few modern French speakers can read the Song of Roland. “Resembles x much more” is pretty irrelevant because it cherry-picks similarities while glossing over differences. One can equally say Old English’s “and forgyf us ure gyltas” is pretty readable, but really you’re scraping the bottom of the argument barrel.
Also glossing over an older literary tradition because the language mutated in response to a new political reality (conquest) is ... curious.
I don't think it's moving the goalposts to say that something understandable by modern French speakers has an older literary tradition than something understandable by modern English speakers. You can call what we speak today "English" but it barely resembles the language used in Beowulf.
You’re entitled to your opinion. All I’ll say is that in the context of the bald fact (French has an older literary tradition than English) presented by a previous commenter, “understandable by modern speakers” is moving the goalposts. In my opinion of course.
Also
> something understandable by modern French speakers
The Song of Roland, used as an example in a previous comment, doesn’t qualify, and actually is yet another reason why this line of argument is pretty sad.
The term "Old English" is completely misleading in this context given how distant modern English is from that language. Both were spoken in England, that's about it. Applying the same logic to "France", should we then consider Gallo-Roman works like Ausonius's Mosella (c. 370 CE) to be "French" literature?
The Beowulf manuscript dates from around 975 CE and is written in what might be better termed Anglo-Saxon. How much can you understand from this random sentence: "þa me þæt gelærdon leode mine, þa selestan, snotere ceorlas"? ("So my vassals advised me well…) I personally can't understand a single word or even relate it in any way to the English I know.
On the other hand, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia was composed in "Old French" in 880 BCE and seems rather intelligible to me. I also just took a random sentence from the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100 BC) and can understand all of it: "Seignurs, vos en ireiz. Branches d’olive en voz mains portereiz, Si me direz a Carlemagne le rei Pur le soen Deu qu’il ait mercit de mei." I'd even go so far as to say that's closer to modern French than Shakespearean English despite being written in Anglo-Norman … Which also means it should probably count as being English literature if Beowulf qualifies…
I guess the lesson here is simply to remember that reality is always a lot more granular than we first expect and that any sweeping judgements on languages, countries, etc. over the span of millennia make very little sense. By that criteria, the linked article was pure clickbait to begin with.
The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary. The length of the German dictionary is irrelevant because: Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte
It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.
Beef (French: bœuf) / Cow (Germanic) Pork (French: porc) / Pig/Swine (Germanic) Mutton (French: mouton) / Sheep (Germanic) Veal (French: veau) / Calf (Germanic) Venison (French: venaison) / Deer (Germanic) Poultry (French: poulet) / Chicken/Fowl (Germanic) Purchase (French) / Buy (Germanic) Commence (French) / Begin (Germanic) Inquire (French) / Ask (Germanic) Receive (French) / Get (Germanic) Odor (French) / Smell (Germanic) Aroma (French, positive) / Stench (Germanic, negative) Cardiac (French/Latin) / Heart (Germanic) Ocular (French/Latin) / Eye (Germanic) Dental (French/Latin) / Tooth (Germanic)