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At least 3:

~26% Germanic

~29% Latin

~29% French

~16% Other

RobWords covers this really well: https://youtu.be/PCE4C9GvqI0?si=4Wd6NFus4v1YqmC3



That might be true if you just count up every word in the dictionary by origin. However if you weight the words by frequency, Germanic will be way higher. That is, if you take a transcript of an average conversation in English, the proportion of words inherited from Old English (i.e., Germanic) will be much higher than 26%.


Almost all the most used words in English are Germanic. Latin in particular is overrpresented because of scientific and technical terms which are rarely used.


It seems hard to measure with any kind of objectivity here, considering how much Latin is in French (and even modern German) as well.




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