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After reading this thread I'm even more glad that we "finnicize" most English words or try to create Finnish equivalents.
Even "single" is sinkku. As in Italian e-mail is sähköposti (electric mail), and people actually use it.
How refreshing! Chinese does that, too. The word for computer in Chinese translates as "electric brain", telephone is "electric speech". There's something to be said for maintaining linguistic integrity.
Was just reading an article on a Nigerian writer, made me remember this thread
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At this point in her life, she says, her own English is "completely confused. My sensibility is Nigerian. I went to school in the US. After Lagos I deeply love London. So I grew up spelling the British way. And then I went to the US and was suddenly spelling "colour" without the "u". My father is horrified by that. I was determined for so long not to use certain American expressions, because I came to the US with this Nigerian/British arrogance of believing English is as it is spoken in England. Americans would say certain things and I would think, people can't speak English."
...
It IS a Germanic language, West Germanic to be precise, a mixed language of course, just like German and other languages, but still, its foundation/core is Germanic...
The most archaich and interesting is Basque, all cutting tools have the prefix "aitz" (stone).
Traveller is right, since English is a neolanguage derived mostly from Latin (Through French), I don't see how ut can invade other similar languages.
I believe that French is the language with more anglicisms.
English isnt germanic, so It can't invade "other" germanic countries.
Modernd english is a mix of "old english" , french and latin languages.
Traveler, English vocabulary is about half French and Latin. Vocabulary is only one part of a language. Even if we were to focus only on vocabulary, the similarity of English and German would still far greater than that between English and French. However, having words from another language family does not change the fundamentals of a language. German and especially Dutch also have large percentages of Latin-rooted words, but this does change the core of the language which is clearly non-Latin. In the case of English, the fundamentals of the language are solidly Germanic, and having a large percentage of French and Latin words do not change this.
Traveler, English vocabulary is about half French and Latin. Vocabulary is only one part of a language. Even if we were to focus only on vocabulary, the similarity of English and German would still far greater than that between English and French. However, having words from another language family does not change the fundamentals of a language. German and especially Dutch also have large percentages of Latin-rooted words, but this does change the core of the language which is clearly non-Latin. In the case of English, the fundamentals of the language are solidly Germanic, and having a large percentage of French and Latin words do not change this.
Together or each? I suppose together so that the other half or so is Germanic, else it would certainly not be considered a Germanic language by any linguists.
Seems the more commonly used words are, the more Germanic they tend to be. Which confirms it is a Germanic language because those core words (see, hear, think, say; I, you, etc.) are the most stubborn as their popularity makes it almost impossible to replace them.
Of the 100 most frequent words in English, a staggering 97% are Germanic.
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