If english is a Germanic language why are there so many words from Latin and Greek?

Question

and What is the percentage of Latin/Greek in the english language?

thanks =)

Answer 1

A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973)[39] that estimated the origin of English words as follows:



Influences in English vocabulary

Langue d'oïl, including French and Old Norman: 28.3%

Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%

Other Germanic languages (including words directly inherited from Old English): 25%

Greek: 5.32%

No etymology given: 4.03%

Derived from proper names: 3.28%

All other languages contributed less than 1%  

Answer 2

All germanic languages build on latin and greek. 60% in the english language is of latin/ greek.

Answer 3

English's got its everyday words (such as father, mother, the days of the week etc.) which come form Anglo-Saxon language, but many others words have been taken from the French language.

I think the 70% of English words come from French.

Even some grammar rules come from French.

Answer 4

Percentages, I have no idea. But I can explain English's history.

The Celts (our original ancestors, they lived all over England and Scotland and stuff) spoke a Germanic language, because they'd been taken over by the Vikings earlier on (the Vikings were from Sweden, Denmark, etc).

Christian missionaries came over in the middle ages and converted (most) everyone and taught them Latin. Then in 1066, the Normans took over England and made French the official language. From then on until about the 1700s, both Latin and Greek were considered the most "educated" of languages and were used for scholarly and scientific works (this explains why all scientific names either have Latin or Greek prefixes).

So as you can see, there was a big mix of a ton of different languages. Then America came about, and we started borrowing a ton of other foreign words (like "shmuck," a Yiddish word, "studio," an Italian word, and "alligator," a Spanish word). More on loanwords in English: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/lo...

Answer 5

What defines which linguistic family a language belongs to is solely its structure - or grammar, and has nothing to do with its vocabulary. In that respect,English is 100% Germanic.I'm afraid that the person whosaid that English takes someof its grammar from French is talking utter rot.

It is true that a very large proportion of English vocabulary is taken from Latin and Greek, but once it has entered the language it is treated entirely in a Germanic way. Thus,if we take a word like"grand" - we say "grander" and "grandest" - the endings -er and -est being Germanic. We say "The professor's classroom" and not "The room of the class of the professor"; if we take verb like "deduce", which comes from the Latin "deducere", we say "I deduced" and not "I deduxi".

Answer 6

85% or words.

Thanks to William the Conqueror, French was the national language of England for 300 years. During this time, there was tremendous borrowing from French and its parent, Latin.

Answer 7

Well, I'm not at all sure about the percentage, but we are a Germanic language most definitely. But we (the English speaking world) take words from every other language we encounter and incorporate it into the language. Phrases such as kamakazi or c'est la vie are not at all English, but we use them regularly anyway because they can fit into our system of spoken grammar. This is just one part of what makes English simultaneously the best and worst language around. Easy to use, hard to learn.