If you want to learn to read and speak Ancient Greek, Latin, Biblical Hebrew, or Old English in fun, immersive classes, sign up for lessons at AncientLanguage.com 🏺📖 How much EASIER is learning Latin than learning Ancient Greek? I big key might be in borrowed vocabulary: Ancient Greek gives us only 5% of our English words, while 60% comes from Latin. That's 12 to 1! How then does this work in practice then trying to understand unfamiliar vocabulary in an ancient text? Beyond lexical similarity, what is the *lexical recognition* we automatically get as English speakers in Greek vs. Latin? The texts seen in the video were copied and pasted from The Latin Library and Perseus websites respectively. 🦂 Support my work on Patreon: www.patreon.com/LukeRanieri 📚 Luke Ranieri Audiobooks: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com 🤠 Take my course LATIN UNCOVERED on StoryLearning, including my original Latin adventure novella "Vir Petasātus" learn.storylearning.com/lu-promo?affiliate_id=3932873 🏛 Ancient Greek in Action · Free Greek Lessons: ruclips.net/p/PLU1WuLg45SixsonRdfNNv-CPNq8xUwgam 👨🏫 My Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata playlist · Free Latin Lessons: ruclips.net/video/j7hd799IznU/видео.html ☕ Support my work with PayPal: paypal.me/lukeranieri 📚 Luke Ranieri Audiobooks: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com Join the channel to support it: ruclips.net/channel/UCRllohBcHec7YUgW6HfltLAjoin 🌅 ScorpioMartianus apud Instagram: instagram.com/lukeranieri/ 🦁 Legio XIII Latin Language Podcast: ruclips.net/user/LegioXIII 🎙 Hundres of hours of Latin & Greek audio: lukeranieri.com/audio 👕 Merch: teespring.com/stores/scorpiomartianus 🦂 www.ScorpioMartianus.com 🦅 www.LukeRanieri.com Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concertos No.11, 12, 13, 14, 22 (Lili Kraus), Die Zauberflöte Overture. #greek #latin #literature 00:00 Intro 04:18 Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 11:16, Plato, The Republic 18:20 Plautus, Amphityro 22:20 Aristophanes, Plutus 25:41 Apuleius, Metamorphoses 30:58 Chariton, Callirhoe 38:05 Reflecting on what this all means 41:40 What does the fox say?
Hi Luke, (or anyone reading who can) please help me, I know noone else who can read Ancient Greek. I have read that this inscription on an ancient talisman "ϹΕΜΕϹΕΙΛΑΜ" means "The Ever-lasting Sun" but I cannot verify this. I believe the letters that appear as capital C are the lunate sigma. Semes Eilam perhaps? How does this mean eternal sun? Thanks
I tried once to check the same for the Russian language. You won't believe, but ~50% of modern Russian lexicon came from the Latin and ~25% from the Greek language!
@@blakerall The Greek language started to influence Proto-Slavic language even before the Christ, but with the Christianity this influence became massive. Still it was mostly limited to religious and philosofic terminology. The Latin language of diplomacy, technology and science started its influence much later - but it was even more significant and continues up today.
I took 4 years of Latin in highschool. My teacher made it fun but I wasn't vary good at Latin. She focused(not a fireplace in Latin) on grammar, and through translation. I took an anki card deck with the vocabulary of LLSPI and started to memorize it. I got up to 500 words I knew compleatly and 1000 words I had contact with it. I can read with a little work I can listen to classical latin and your youtube page. Its amazing how much vocabulary helps out a language.
Democracy vs republic, logic vs ratio, sympathy vs compassion, philanthropy vs charity, physics vs natural, erotic vs amorous, ethnics vs morals etc. Can you feel that difference between Greek and Latin? The difference between the poetic vs the prosaic?
very nice video!! I really like your videos. As a greek. i would like to add that another 25% of words in the English vocubalary are of greek origin. As you said, 5% of these words are directly borrowed from Greek, while another 25% are borrowed indirectly, mainly through Latin.
Nowhere close that many. I'm pretty sure the 5-6% estimate includes all words of Greek origin -(except perhaps some very obscure medical or other newly minted technical terms that no one's ever heard)- including all of the words borrowed through Latin .
@@nikos50100 thanks for informing me that google exists... Zolotas' speech from what I remember reading it years ago is such an extremely random aggregation of hyper pompous words that the average English speaker has never heard of (many of them I doubt you can even find in an English dictionary) but they sure are hell do not add up to the 25 or 30% of the English vocabulary that you seem to think they do. You can also probably try to communicate in English the same way Zolotas did but by using exclusively Latin derived words(instead of exclusively Greek) and it would end up sounding a lot less weird because you'd have a much better range of vocabulary to choose from.
I agree with you that Greek is harder than Latin, for the reason that you explain. But there is a feature of ancient Greek that makes it a bit less hard than it would otherwise be: specifically, a large proportion of its vocabulary consists of compound words that are formed out of simpler roots, prefixes, and suffixes. E.g. in the passage from Plato's Republic 1 that you go through in the video, we find the verb εὐδοκιμεῖν, which is obviously compounded out of the prefix εὐ (good) and the root δοκ- (what people think / reputation); it's not too hard to figure out that it must mean something like "win a good reputation". We also find the word κακουργεῖν, compounded out of κακόν (bad) and ἔργον (work / deed); it's not hard to work out that this means something like "doing bad deeds". Etc.
Latin also has many compounds. For example, for κακουργεῖν, Latin has malefacere (from which you get English maleficient) I think that Greek has more sound shifts obfuscating the roots in the compounds.
Excuse but some of the latin terms are clearly greek, eg: Rhetoris, Philosophian, Ergo, Genere and the word for "school" that I cannot find right now. Thanks anyway for the video.
His point was not to give the etymologies of the words but to see how many words in a Latin text are recognisable for an English speaker *even if* they are of Greek origin.
@@Marble8King Both Latin and Greek inherited this word from Indo-European so they are not similar because one borrowed it from the other or vice versa but because both languages are Indo-European.
6:53 It's not only 5% of Greek in the English language...its not only the scientific words but also everyday words...pauce ,kiss,cemetery,church, fantasy,cycle,cynic,school,cosmos, decade,acrobat,angel,archeology,architect, aroma astronaut,athlete,atlas,auto,autonomy,chair, chaos, cinema,comedy, tragedy, clinic, dialogue, disc,drama,dynasty and thousands more
It can be interesting to compare less recent Finnish (which is not filled with obvious English-derived words) and Ancient Greek vocabulary. Some words that I've noticed bearing resemblance - sometimes deviating from official etymological explanations - are (taking just words that begin with K, for demonstration) καυχάομαι kehua/kehuskella (to boast), καινος kaino (shy about NEW things), καλος kallis (precious, valuable), κερδαίνω kertyä (an increase in something), κρίνω kuri-/kurittaa (to discipline). These are all probably derived from Indo-European.
@Teitan4973 Interestingly enough, some think that a part of this is only a temporary phenomena of acquiring foreign words where they're currently in the pre-calque or pre-transliteration phase. Finglish looks like an interesting phenomenon to observe & see develop.
I would add to this the 2 strange coincidences: The "liian" ("λίαν" in ancient greek = much) and the suffixes for first and second plural verbs: "-mme" (-με in greek) and "-tte" (-τε in greek). I was so astonished noticing this.
Fascinating experiment! Never seen anyone else do such an in-depth analysis of lexical or etymological comprehension for English speakers when encountering texts in either one of these, our beloved classical languages.
5:31 But what percentage of the 60% Latin vocabulary is inherited from ancient Greek? No-one ever bothers to say that but it is probably an easily discoverable fact. Well maybe it isn't. Wouldn't it be fair to say that part of the difficulty is that the student of Latin only has to learn one version of Latin whereas there are a few dialects of ancient Greek thrown in the classical literature. Also I get the feeling that ancient Greek is perhaps much more irregular?
Latin has a handful of common words borrowed from Greek, but really very few. For the most part Greek influence on Latin literature seems to have been more stylistic (things like the borrowing of Greek metre), but much less borrowed vocabulary than you might expect. Of course there are also many words that are similar not because of borrowing, but because of common origin.
@@Philoglossos Hmmm.. perhaps the common origin would account for quite a few of those. It's just that whenever I check a word on Merriam-Webster (or perhaps another dictionary) which I recognize as Greek, it mostly says they are of Latin origin. Now that I'm writing this, however, I'm struggling to find examples of such words as I mostly come up with words which are traced back to Latin and to Greek before that. Hopefully at some point these aspects will become searchable in on-line dictionaries.
@@Stelios.Posantzis I'll give you some examples: poēma - borrowing from Greek, and the native word 'carmen' is more common pontus - borrowing from Greek, and the native word 'mare' is more common hōra - borrowed from greek, in its more specific sense there's no native equivalent āēr - Greek borrowing, native equivalents are either more specific or rarer taurus/ταυρος - shared inherited word (compare Old Norse þjórr, Lithuanian taũras, Avestan staora, etc.) jugum/ζυγον - shared inherited word, compare Sanskrit jugam, English 'yoke' pēs/πους - shared inherited word (compare English foot, Sanskrit pā́t) lupus / λυκος - inherited, compare 'wolf', Lithuanian 'vilkas', Sanskrit 'vrkah'. Then there's some you wouldn't immediately recognize, like Greek ἕπομαι and Latin sequor. In my experience as someone who knows Latin very well and is learning Greek actively, most shared vocab seems to be inherited and not borrowed, since both languages are quite archaic and preserve a lot from Indo European.
@@Philoglossos Thank you for these great examples. I didn't know about these Greek loans in Latin. My guess for a quick rule distinguishing between common words vs. borrowed words is that if the root of the word is identical, then it's borrowed whereas if the root has or or two phonemes changed, then it's common. There are always exceptions though, so perhaps it is safer to also consider the word endings.
Hi Luke, Nice analysis, yet it seems to me you may have missed a few things. First, on the calculation: that is not 12 times more to learn. It is (100-5)/(100-60) = 95/40 = 2.375 times more. Second, on the text example from Plato, you could add: prepositions: why give προς, but not ἀπο, συν, περι, εκ, προ, ὑπο, and why "προς" in a compound but not alone? περιιόντα: how about "ion" in chemistry? συνεχώρησεν: why not χώρος as in isochoric and isochore, in thermodynamics and genetics? αποδιδόναι: why not "don" as in donation? (common root) εἶπες: how about "epic"? why did you say you stop doing those words? χάριν: how about "eucharist"? δρῶ: why not drastic, drama, dramatic? ἐθελήσεις: there exists "Thelema", for a certain movement. συμφέρον, συμφέρει: you hesitated, yet it is συμ- as in "symbol", -φέρον as in "periphery". δίκαιον: δικ- as in "syndicate". βόεια: isn't that understandable as of the same root as beef and bovine? (not to mention butter and Bosporus) ὑπολαμβάνεις: ὑπο- as hypo-, λαμβ- from λαβ- as in "syllable", with a nasal infix. So the valid point remains that the Greek words are at a higher register than the Latin ones. Sincerely, your Greek friend
Τρίπους is attested in Mycenaean, so "tripod" is one of the words with the oldest history in English. I think you said "architect" at "τέκνον"; the actual root word is "τέκτων".
I believe this explanation straight off. In comparison, as a Swede, Icelandic/Old Norse is definitely incomprehensible to us, but the speed at which I acquire vocabulary while studying it is crazy fast compared to Latin or other languages. Of course by my knowing English, Latin is in turn also easier than Greek.
German would be also easy to learn for you since German was lingua franca in the Deutsche Hanse and so it influenced Swedish a lot. Unlike Norwegian or Danish that were fairly untouched by the Deutsche Hanse.
Ancient Greek gives us only 5% of our English words? Ι am not so sure about that because a huge number of Latin words are loanwords from Greek that are counted as Latin, while in reality, they were originally Greek. The Oxford Companion to the English Language states that the 'influence of classical Greek on English has been largely indirect, through Latin and French, and largely lexical and conceptual...'. According to one estimate, more than 150,000 words of English are derived from Greek words. These include technical and scientific jargon. Telephone and cinematography are French-made words that use Greek components.... With well over 100k Greek words, that 5% figure looks false to me. It is more like 25% rather than 5%.
i didn't realise jesse pinkman made latin videos! i only jest, i'm sure this video will be very interesting, i've been looking into (ancient) greek lately and it's very interesting
As someone whose first language is German I feel in our language the distribution of Latin and Ancient Greek loan words is much more equal. We don’t have nearly as many Latin loan words in everyday vocabulary as English and so both Latin and Ancient Greek are much more restricted to scientific terms. You brought up "βίος" as an example. Now while you might look for "organic" (Latin) produce in an American grocery store, in a German store they’ll stick a "Bio" label on the produce.
Interestingly because (modern) Greek also happens to have a (relatively) very low content of Latin origin words, probably way lower than even German does (and the ones in Greek aren't even "fancy" or "educated" like the ones in English but rather banal words like spiti or porta, actually the latter might even be from Italian for all I know) it's usually very easy for me to recognize which English words are of Greek origin, or indeed which English words of Latin/Old French origin are actually Greek. ... "Organic" being one of them funnily enough 😅
I don't know if it's close to the video's topic, but I'd really like to share my thoughts on it. Being a Greek myself, as well as a language-nerd, I've always found learning English vocabulary challenging, maybe because of its extensive Latinate vocabulary. Memorizing words that were from Ancient Greek was relatively very easy for me, but they were extremely limited compared to the Latin ones, but as my passion for languages grew, as well as having bought the Lingua Latina book a couple of months ago, I feel like I finally could get the hang of it. E.g., I can link the English word "equestrian" to Latin "equus" (horse), or English "anniversary" to Latin "annus" (year) and I can't express how much I'm enjoying this feeling! 😊
You’re being extremely generous with the Greek translations. Unless somebody’s already a student of languages, and it’s familiar with the Greek alphabet, there’s no possible way that those words would be slightly familiar to the man on the street.
Nice video! Something I have noticed is that if one learns or is associated with the vocabulary of 2-3 different IE languages from different branches, the cognate recognition percentage definitely goes up. Some languages like the romance ones like to use greek and latin mixes where english would prefer germanic/french ones. Maybe a good literary example would be how Weltanschaung (worldview) is calqued into spanish as cosmovisión.
Take the word Ζυγός jugam in Sanskrit...it has etymology only in Greek..it comes from the Boeotian word δυγον ...ζυγος ...ζυγον δυγον...δυο+αγω the word ζυγωμα jugom is a deviration of the word ζυγος .
I learned in school that most of the Latin lexicon came into English through French after the Battle of Hastings (1066): The Norman King (Guillaume le Conquerant defeated King Harold).
His name was actually William in Norman, which was directly borrowed into English. There are actually a lot of differences between Parisian (what became French) and Old Norman (and then later Anglo-Norman in England). The pronunciation system (phonology) and the grammar were quite different, and much of the basic vocabulary of Norman was borrowed from Old Norse. I also believe that Norman did not have the same influence from Frankish that Parisian had (roughly ten percent of French).
If you know more Greek you could see that the latin words are not so Latin , and most of them have Greek etymology. When you see the Greek text you dont underline all the lexicon that you meet.I inform you allmost all the words that you let exist in English via scientific terminology. You can not make disinformation If you say 60 %οf English is Latin why dont you say that 30-35%of the lexicon that you think is Latin is Greek.????? Learn etymology,learn etymology of the Latin lexicon ,and dont consider the Greek words as Latins.Allthe importanrt lexicon of Latin was Greek loans.They were more barbarians than Germanic people when they met ancient the Greeek civilization. And lastly I imform you the their alphabet is another form of Greek alphabet of south Italy.
No, you are probably interpreting words with a common Proto-Indo-European origin as being “Greek” as opposed to Latin, both Latin and Greek coming from PIE.
I noticed that many words from latin text, are in reality of greek roots. For example philosophia, is genuinely greek, but you counted it as a latin one. Same rhetoris, tragoedia, comoedia. There are also latin terms that actually are of greek origin but it is not that easy to recognise them even by a native greek speaker. For example video comes from εἴδομαι but because of modern greek language doesn't use the traditional pronunciation we cannot detect that ἰ sounds like vi, also audio comes from greek term αὐδή meaning voice but has stopped being in use except as an ingredient at composite words like άναυδος meaning speechless.
Γεια Κόστη, must of that is incorrect, I’m afraid. Firstly, words like philosophia were not counted as “Latin;” they were in the Latin text, and were comprehensible to the Anglophone reading Latin. That’s the measure. Videō is *not* from Greek, but from Proto-Italic, from Proto-Indo-European, the same origin as the Greek words with εἰδ-. Ditto audiō which is *not* from Greek, but also from Proto-Italic from Proto-Indo-European.
@@polyMATHY_LukeMaybe you are correct about Proto-Indo-European roots, but still detectable through greek texts. Terms like philosophia rhetoris, tragoedia are greek 100% and adapted by Romans directly from Greek language 🙂
@@polyMATHY_Luke also Δρῶν δράσις for sure are detectable for english speakers, drastic, diadrastic, you can find lots of greek terms, but not on everyday english, mostly through scientific terms of higher value, like astronomy, literature, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, chemistry, physics etc.
I want to respectfully correct something you said. Feel free to disagree. 4:10 I don't think that the maths work like that. If you recognise 60% percent of a Latin text that means you don't recognise 40%. With ancient Greek that is 5% and 95% respectively. 95/40=2.375. Although the real number would be a bit different because here I assumed that because about 60% of the English vocabulary comes from Latin, you would recognise 60% of Latin vocabulary. (same for Greek) That is probably not quite right, but is likely pretty close. Another thing is that quite a few of these cognates are probably not recognisable at first but "make sense" once you know the English translation. Like "nunc". I didn't immediately recognise that is translates to "now", but now I can see the connection. But of course, Greek is a much harder language to learn and this is one of the major reasons.
I see what calculation you’re doing, and that’s a valid way to understand it too, but that’s not what I meant to highlight here. This is instead what I wanted to highlight: For any given set of 100 English words in the mental dictionary of an English speaker, 60 are from Latin and 5 are from Greek. Thus, how much more does our native lexicon help us when dealing with Latin vs. Ancient Greek texts? 12 times more. As seen in the video, the three types of literature in my unscientific sample and analysis don’t seem to reveal these numbers: in Latin texts, we may recognize 70 or 80 words per 100, and in an Ancient Greek text 15 or 20. That’s definitely not a ratio of 12:1. And since the goal is reading fluency, which means achieving the magic number of 98% reading comprehension of true extensive reading, I’d say the latter type of figure is more important than the 60% from Latin, 5% from Greek. At best, the 12:1 is a clue to how much longer it might take to build up enough Ancient Greek vocabulary to be a fluent reader. Anecdotally, 12 times longer seems to be consistent with what I have observed in myself and others.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I am still not sure of that. The ratios you showed in the texts are not 12/1. They are closer to 4/1. The reason why, for some English speakers, ancient Greek might indeed take 12 times longer to learn could be because it takes longer to before you get to the point where you can start reading and thus start learning new vocabulary more effectively. Though, if I remember correctly, you already spoke Italian at a decent level before you started learning Latin, which must have helped you a lot with Latin but not so much with Greek. Also, from what I have understood once from this video (ruclips.net/video/gqDld1-dgI0/видео.html), ancient Greek has around three times as much grammar going on. That too takes a lot of time to learn and fully master. Although he also says (in the video) that Greek has many more words. Again. I am saying this with respect.
Before I started intensively learning Latin, a page of Latin text seemed like a platter of familiar-looking words that I could only make sense of once I got the grammar under my hat. Plus a lot of the Latin words originally have a somewhat different sense than the modern ones.
Does anyone know a good source on how the Proto-Indo-European language got its "-os, -us, -as, -is, -es etc." endings in the nouns and adjectives? These "-Vs" endings are the most notable feature of the old Indo-European languages, retained today in the Baltic languages, but lost elsewhere. Why did most of the modern Indo-European languages lost these "-Vs" endings?
I’m certainly no expert on this, so take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve heard a theory that the ancestor of PIE may have been an ergative language. Marking the nominative is rare cross-linguistically- usually the nominative is the unmarked, most basic form of the noun. But in ergative languages, the object is unmarked by default and the agent is marked explicitly. In addition, there’s evidence that PIE used to have a simpler animate-inanimate gender distinction, as was preserved in Hittite for example. Often in animacy-based gender systems, the animate nouns take nominative-accusative marking, while inanimate nouns take ergative-absolutive marking. After all, it’s assumed that an animate noun is the one doing the verb, so there’s no need to mark it. If the opposite is true, and the inanimate object is performing the verb, then this unusual situation needs extra marking to make things clear. Compare the neuter gender in Latin, for example, whose nouns decline identically in the nominative and accusative. Since neuter nouns are usually not the ones doing the verb, there’s no need to mark them explicitly as the object. If you had a sentence with three words: “dog,” “rock”, and “see,” in any order, the assumption is that the dog is the one seeing the rock. If the unexpected is true, and the rock developed sentience and grew eyes, then the accusative case on “dog” (canis > canem) serves to highlight this in a nominative-accusative language. If neuter nouns in Latin were ergative-absolutive, then the ergative marking on “rock” would help to reinforce this even more. Perhaps in the transition from pre-PIE to PIE, the old absolutive (unmarked) forms of the noun were lost entirely, and these new nominative endings in -s (which were the old ergative endings) spread by analogy to become the default on animate/masculine nouns. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know for sure what happened, but imo ergativity shenanigans are a fairly reasonable explanation. As for why most IE languages have lost the -s marking- it’s the same explanation I gave above. Marking the nominative is both very strange and unnecessary, so it makes sense that this ending would be the one to get lost first. But also, the -s ending is preserved in Greek and Icelandic (as -ur) for example, so I’m not sure what you mean by “lost elsewhere.”
@@DustyKun123Thank you very much for the exhaustive answer. I also wonder whether these PIE case endings are etymologically related (cognates or borrowings) to the case suffixes in other non-Indoeuropean languages, for example several case suffixes in Georgian are also in the form of "-Vs". "But also, the -s ending is preserved in Greek and Icelandic (as -ur) for example, so I’m not sure what you mean by “lost elsewhere.” " My mistake, posted the comment too fast and too late I remembered the most obvious - the modern Greek of course. The majority of IE languages lost nominative case suffix, including those with free word order like Slavic.
@@IGLUPhylogeny Romance and Slavic languages all had a general tendency to delete word final consonants, just that in Slavic it failed to obliterate the case system because of vowel changes that also occurred. Germanic meanwhile tended to reduce unstressed syllables in general. Also, in Slavic it's not really true that there is no nominative suffix, it's more accurately described as a zero suffix. For one thing, it can resurface a hidden yer in the stem (Nom _pes_ to Gen _psa_ is a common one) or vowel length in West Slavic. For another, it doesn't only mark nominative singular of masculine nouns, it's also often genitive plural of nouns that have non-zero nominative singular ( _žena_ > _žen_ ), or imperatives of verbs sometimes. Also, this is highly hypothetical on my end, but I notice that languages with stress accent have a stronger tendency to reduce or lose final syllables. PIE had a pitch accent, but Germanic and Italic replaced it with stress very early, while Slavic lost pitch relatively recently (and not in all languages), and Baltic of course still has pitch accent.
@@DustyKun123 Not that I disagree with the idea, and Pre-PIE ergativity does have some typological justification (Caucasus), but is it really the only valid explanation? Korean and Japanese both have nominative-marking particles, do we require that they come from ergative languages, too?
@@krupam0 I think there is pragmatic/discourse stuff going on in both Japanese and Korean that complicates things. The classic example is 像は鼻が長い (zou wa hana ga nagai - elephant TOP snout SUBJ is.long) ‘the elephant’s snout is long.’ Here, the subject marker “ga” is used to distinguish the topic (marked with wa) from the comment/rheme, not just to mark the subject. I only speak Japanese with any ability, but I know Korean works similarly in this regard. Also, “ga” used to be the genitive marker, which is fossilized in some toponyms and counter words. I’m not saying this discredits it as a subject-marking particle, but impressionistically it feels more like a discourse particle and less like a syntactic particle, if that makes sense. When case particles are used in Japanese, they’re often emphatic, not required (in the spoken language at least). We can do the same thing in English periphrastically, though it would sound weird, e.g. “As for Starbucks, chai tea is the drink that is best” or “Among my art club members, John is the one who is best at painting.” Anyway, even if Japanese and Korean do have a marked nominative, it IS still rare cross-linguistically.
A lot of people are arguing about how many of the Latin loanwords come directly from Greek, and I wanna address the counter argument that "we're talking about direct borrowings only". In that scenario, 60% of English definitely do NOT come from Latin. Around 28% of our lexicon is from French, 24% native, and only 22% directly from Latin. That number sneaks up to something that can be rounded up to 60 when you add Latin with all Romance loanwords, but by itself Latin is only at 22. So its either only direct loans, where it's 22% vs 5%, or its indirect loans too, where it's ~60% to ~25%
The word in ancient Greek, it has two "root themes". It goes like that Nom: Ζεύς, Gen: Διός (and more rarely Ζηνός), Dat: Διί (and more rarely Ζηνί), Acc: Δία (and more rarely Ζñνα), Voc: Ζεῦ. The Ζ- theme and the Δι- theme both derive from the same original protohellenic root, but were eventually differentiated, so that the former is used in nominative and voccative, and the latter in the oblique cases of ancient Greek
@AthrihosPithekos αυτό λέω να τις σταματήσουν. Δεν θα μας διδάξουν ούτε αυτοί ούτε οι μειοδότες Έλληνες την ιστορία μας και την γλώσσα μας. Και ας μας αποδείξουν την ύπαρξη των "Ινδοευρωπαίων" και όχι με αερολογιες επειδή κάποιους συμφέρουν αυτές οι θεωριες
Strictly speaking, "school" "rhetoric" and "philosophiam' are Greek words directly borrowed by Latin. I appreciate Greek will be harder for English speakers. Reciprocally, us Greeks have a clear disadvantage learning any other language. Besides having to learn a different writing system, we also have the vocabulary disadvantage compared to say the Germanic-Latin-Slavic ones which all seem to have so much more in common and a range of "easier" languages to choose from to learn. Strangely enough, I found Italian exceptionally easy to learn, fluent within less than a year. German, French, English and Dutch took a lot longer. But German and English helped enormously with learning Dutch. I can understand a lot of Spanish because of the French and Italian I am trying to learn Korean now, it's no harder than learning French or English.
I am sure one of the biggest obstacles in understanding Greek vs Latin is understanding the Greek script. Once it is transliterated into a Latin based script, i think its much easier as they are similar enough.
How about if you didn’t count the Greek words borrowed into Latin as Latin, like comedy, tragedy, school and others? Then you’d see that the percentage of Greek words into English is much higher.
Ah, but I counted as comprehensible all manner of words, like “nunc,” that are not from Latin but cognate through Proto-Indo-European. The point is not to give credit to Greek, but to determine how comprehensible a Latin text is when contrasted with an Ancient Greek one.
When you were doing the Latin text underlining I think Graeci/Graecorum should count, since the English ethnonym is definitely borrowed from Latin and its not the one used in Greek or several other languages... On the other hand, given how obviously Greek, "rhetoris" maybe shouldn't count(isn't that oratoria in Latin normally anyway?). Considering however it's presence in the text(alongside schola, philosophia, tragoedia and... ego) I'm kind of wondering how much of this kind of "recognition" a regular Latin speaker would have experienced while reading a Greek text?
How is possible for shepherd nomads to create something more complicated than Greek language which was being shaped for centuries by Greek writers as Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, Herodotus ....
You missed quite a few in this one. At 31:40 missed όλης and also συμπλέξαι (συν+πλέξαι, cf. apoplectic, apoplexy) at 32:04. Also δημοτελής (δήμο- + -τελής) at 32:36 and perhaps σχεδόν (for those well versed in mathematical subjects; cf. scedastic),. συνοδίαν (cf. synod) and ταχέως (although again rather technical; cf. tachometer) at 33:08, μετά at 33:18, αριστεύς at 33:20, κάλλους at 33:21. Obviously the difficulty with Greek is that the English speaker has to recognise the etymology of the Greek words whereas with Latin there is no such need. Quite a different level of difficulty. I would not expect the common English speaker to recognise the 2 or 3 letter root you underlined in many of the words.
Even if the percentages (60% and 5%) are correct, they are not really relevant for the point you are trying to make. Here's an example: the fact that 50% of humans are men does not mean that 50% of men are humans (100% of men are humans). Similarly, the fact that 5% of the words in the english dictionary are also in the ancient greek dictionary (english words with greek origin) does not mean that 5% of the words in the ancient greek dictionary are in the english dictionary. We can notice the difference with some very basic math: C = number of common words in english and ancient greek (english words with greek origin) E = number of english words G = number of ancient greek words The percentage of 5% is the result of the division C/E, whereas the percentage that would be relevant for someone to know how many greek words they will recognise is the result of C/G. It is also important to notice that if E is larger than G (that is, if english has more words than ancient greek, which may very well be the case), then the percentage of C/G (which we are interested in) is larger than the percentage of C/E which is 5%. Therefore, it could be the case that english speakers can recognise more than 5% of ancient greek words, and all of the above also holds for latin of course. Anyways, the video was really nice and I hope I helped a bit with the math! Greetings from Greece :)
Out of all germanic languages English has been influenced by latin the most thanks to the Norman invasion (Norman being French is a Latin-originated language). Hastings did the job ;)
Hello, Luke! I am a big fan of your content and I would really like to translate your videos on Russian Language for our community. Of course, I would make sure everyone understands that you are the author, and I am just a translator. I would like to upload my translations on my RUclips channel. Please answer, do you give your consent? Best Wishes, Your fan
Hi there. No you may not, but thank you for asking permission; however, if you would like to write subtitles and email them to me, I will add them to the video.
Ancient Greek is one of the most quintessentially Indo-European languages, retaining the -os nom. sing. ending, the augment, reduplication, and so many other traits.
Sounds like a rather unhinged claim. Perhaps whoever made that claim was trying to over emphasize the influence of non-IE languages on Greek (the so called Pre-Greek) that we don't really see in other families, but it's still at most about as accurate as claiming that English isn't Germanic.
"Else" is a cognate of "αλλος". "Ακουσαι" contains "ους", and "hear" contains "ear". This is no coincidence; they're cognates. "Ακουσαι/hear" is found only in Hellenic, Greek, and maybe Tocharian.
With 60% of Latin vocabulary, I always ask myself whether modern English shouldn't actually be considered a hybrid Latino-Germanic language, and whether ethnic British don't want to recognize that just because they are notoriously racists towards southern Europeans.
In terms of lexical recognition, I think you underlined too many words for the Latin. But I guess it depends on what kind of person you're asking. I do think more people would know cum than vir or dicere and deponere because although they are cognates, their relation to english is hidden until you've already learned the meaning of the word. Many of the other words like ingenio would probably be fairly obvious to a layman as long as they know the word ingenious.
It's not gonna be 10 times more difficult to learn Greek (Russian is not 10 times more difficult than Spanish!), but it might very well be more than twice as difficult.
What indoeuropean are you talking about .. this is afalse theory.. The word Ζυγος you mentioned it has etymology only in the Greek language ...Ζυγος derives from the verb ζευγνυμι (zeugnumi) means to join together, ζεύγος a couple, ζεῦξις, put two things together and more
60%??? that's combining both words of Latin origin and of French origin, taking only words directly loaned from Latin the percentage is around 30% not 60%
Evidently it’s indeed 60%; the non-Latin contribution from French is also there, Frankish words like guard or non Classical Latin words like turn. But the 30% from French is almost entirely directly from the parent language, meaning Latin, which still allows us great ease of comprehension. Plus 30% taken from literary Latin.
I was being generous both for the Latin and Greek; someone who doesn’t know Latin or Ancient Greek would not automatically recognize all of the roots here, but as one learns these languages they would be able to connect the various vocabulary words with English terms. That’s the analysis I made.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I guess that's true.. I've been working on Koine with the hope of reading Church Fathers.. After a year I do recognize cognates I wouldn''t have at first. Maybe in a couple years Latin will seem easy..
τραγικοκωμῳδία,πρόλογος, deus also comes from Διος and dont talk to me about indoeuropean theory it doesn't exist. That supposedly Indo-European language is the proto- Greek it self...no question about this...
Cum de fenestra corvus raptum caseum comesse vellet, celsa residens arbore, vulpes hunc vidit, deinde sic coepit loqui: “O qui tuarum, corve, pennarum est nitor! Quantum pulchritudinis corpore et vultu geris! Si vocem haberes, nulla prior ales foret”. At ille stultus, dum vult vocem ostendere, emisit ore caseum, quem celeriter dolosa vulpes avidis rapuit dentibus. Tunc demum ingemuit corvi deceptus stupor.😛
Hi Luke what about word Okey. O.k it's truth that it's coming from greek όλα καλά we use to say in greek just οκ when we agree we something I need your opinion about it
I asked chatgpt about and it gave me the following answer: Scientific and technical terms in English are heavily influenced by Greek and Latin. While precise percentages can vary, here's a general breakdown: Greek Influence in Scientific Terms Approximately 90% of scientific terms in English have Greek origins. This is especially true in disciplines like medicine, biology, and astronomy (e.g., "biology" from Greek bios meaning life, and logos meaning study). Latin Influence in Scientific Terms Latin accounts for a significant portion of the remaining terms, often related to taxonomy, legal, and technical writing. Overall, a majority of technical vocabulary is Latin-based, including fields like chemistry and law. Overall Impact In the field of science, 90% or more of terms are from Latin and Greek combined. Latin tends to dominate taxonomy and standardization, while Greek often provides foundational roots for theories and methodologies.
That’s right. Did you get to the part where I talked about this discrepancy? We expected there to be a different result, since the analysis I do in the video is measuring something quite different than English lexical inventory. 60% lemmas from Latin and 5% lemmas from Greek simply shows us that an English speaker may recognize roughly 12 times as many unique roots and other word-forms in any given text. But that text may use and re-use any of those lemmas an unlimited number of times; thus, while the variety of Latin lemmas in English is higher, the few Greek lemmas we do have are repeated enough in the Ancient Greek texts sampled in my video to give us 20% lemma recognition. Do you see difference? It’s fascinating.
5% is the amount of english vocabulary that is of greek origin. The fact that 20% of a greek text could be recognizable to an english speaker has nothing to do with that. You’re comparing apples and oranges.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thank you for the explanation I must have missed that part. So are these 5% of words just the ones that come directly from Greek? What about Greek words that come through Latin or French for example that would also be recognisable to an English speaker even though they arrived in English via an intermediary language. For example anchor or butter. Are these included in the 5%? As a bilingual native English and Greek speaker I feel that I can see the Greek origin in a lot more than 5% of English words.
You must have misunderstood me. French naturally has an even greater amount of Latin words, upwards of 75% or more I believe. French words of non-Latin origin are also a part of English, but they contribute far less than those that go back to Classical Latin. That’s what my comment meant. Do you follow now?
Saying 60% of english words are from latin is totally misleading many people. Hearing this many people think that it would means that english is mostly made of latin words, and as such should be more or less be seen as a romance language, or at least a mixed language. It is not. This thing is that this number concerns the total number of latin-based words found in english dictionary. Many of them are rarely used, and even many are unknown to an average speaker. Of course there are still apart of these latin-based words that are commonly used, but they would never form a majority of a normal text. In some academic fields where the vocabulary can be more « intellectual » they could be a lot of them but even then all gramatical link words that make a give meaning to the concepts would still be almost 100% germanic. In a common average english speech, the number of latin-based words are less than 5%, which is far to make english romance of even ixedd germanic-romance as so many people would like to think.
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How much EASIER is learning Latin than learning Ancient Greek? I big key might be in borrowed vocabulary: Ancient Greek gives us only 5% of our English words, while 60% comes from Latin. That's 12 to 1! How then does this work in practice then trying to understand unfamiliar vocabulary in an ancient text? Beyond lexical similarity, what is the *lexical recognition* we automatically get as English speakers in Greek vs. Latin?
The texts seen in the video were copied and pasted from The Latin Library and Perseus websites respectively.
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#greek #latin #literature
00:00 Intro
04:18 Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes
11:16, Plato, The Republic
18:20 Plautus, Amphityro
22:20 Aristophanes, Plutus
25:41 Apuleius, Metamorphoses
30:58 Chariton, Callirhoe
38:05 Reflecting on what this all means
41:40 What does the fox say?
Hi Luke, (or anyone reading who can) please help me, I know noone else who can read Ancient Greek. I have read that this inscription on an ancient talisman "ϹΕΜΕϹΕΙΛΑΜ" means "The Ever-lasting Sun" but I cannot verify this. I believe the letters that appear as capital C are the lunate sigma. Semes Eilam perhaps? How does this mean eternal sun? Thanks
lol😂 answered my question 😂
Answered my own question, looks like it was Hebrew written in greek letters which is why it made no sense to me, semes = shemesh = sun, eilam= eternal
I tried once to check the same for the Russian language. You won't believe, but ~50% of modern Russian lexicon came from the Latin and ~25% from the Greek language!
True!
When I hear people speak ancient Greek it reminds me of Italian/Spanish accents and just a little bit of a Russian accent too. Maybe this is why?
@@blakerall The Greek language started to influence Proto-Slavic language even before the Christ, but with the Christianity this influence became massive. Still it was mostly limited to religious and philosofic terminology.
The Latin language of diplomacy, technology and science started its influence much later - but it was even more significant and continues up today.
Wait really? What did you use to figure that out?
@@igorvoloshin3406 Fascinating! Yeah, I always feel like I hear the Russian accent at times so that makes sense.
Many many words that you count as Latin, themselves originate from Greek.
I took 4 years of Latin in highschool. My teacher made it fun but I wasn't vary good at Latin. She focused(not a fireplace in Latin) on grammar, and through translation. I took an anki card deck with the vocabulary of LLSPI and started to memorize it. I got up to 500 words I knew compleatly and 1000 words I had contact with it. I can read with a little work I can listen to classical latin and your youtube page. Its amazing how much vocabulary helps out a language.
Democracy vs republic, logic vs ratio, sympathy vs compassion, philanthropy vs charity, physics vs natural, erotic vs amorous, ethnics vs morals etc.
Can you feel that difference between Greek and Latin? The difference between the poetic vs the prosaic?
very nice video!! I really like your videos. As a greek. i would like to add that another 25% of words in the English vocubalary are of greek origin. As you said, 5% of these words are directly borrowed from Greek, while another 25% are borrowed indirectly, mainly through Latin.
Nowhere close that many. I'm pretty sure the 5-6% estimate includes all words of Greek origin -(except perhaps some very obscure medical or other newly minted technical terms that no one's ever heard)- including all of the words borrowed through Latin .
@ntonisa6636 just google. You can check the speech of xenophon Zolotas.
@@nikos50100 thanks for informing me that google exists... Zolotas' speech from what I remember reading it years ago is such an extremely random aggregation of hyper pompous words that the average English speaker has never heard of (many of them I doubt you can even find in an English dictionary) but they sure are hell do not add up to the 25 or 30% of the English vocabulary that you seem to think they do. You can also probably try to communicate in English the same way Zolotas did but by using exclusively Latin derived words(instead of exclusively Greek) and it would end up sounding a lot less weird because you'd have a much better range of vocabulary to choose from.
I agree with you that Greek is harder than Latin, for the reason that you explain. But there is a feature of ancient Greek that makes it a bit less hard than it would otherwise be: specifically, a large proportion of its vocabulary consists of compound words that are formed out of simpler roots, prefixes, and suffixes. E.g. in the passage from Plato's Republic 1 that you go through in the video, we find the verb εὐδοκιμεῖν, which is obviously compounded out of the prefix εὐ (good) and the root δοκ- (what people think / reputation); it's not too hard to figure out that it must mean something like "win a good reputation". We also find the word κακουργεῖν, compounded out of κακόν (bad) and ἔργον (work / deed); it's not hard to work out that this means something like "doing bad deeds". Etc.
Latin also has many compounds. For example, for κακουργεῖν, Latin has malefacere (from which you get English maleficient) I think that Greek has more sound shifts obfuscating the roots in the compounds.
Excuse but some of the latin terms are clearly greek, eg: Rhetoris, Philosophian, Ergo, Genere and the word for "school" that I cannot find right now.
Thanks anyway for the video.
His point was not to give the etymologies of the words but to see how many words in a Latin text are recognisable for an English speaker *even if* they are of Greek origin.
And also "ego"
@@Marble8King Both Latin and Greek inherited this word from Indo-European so they are not similar because one borrowed it from the other or vice versa but because both languages are Indo-European.
6:53 It's not only 5% of Greek in the English language...its not only the scientific words but also everyday words...pauce ,kiss,cemetery,church, fantasy,cycle,cynic,school,cosmos, decade,acrobat,angel,archeology,architect, aroma astronaut,athlete,atlas,auto,autonomy,chair, chaos, cinema,comedy, tragedy, clinic, dialogue, disc,drama,dynasty and thousands more
Well done sir, I would like to add, but they are too many, so, no point on doing it.
Pauce? What does pauce mean?
There's one with a Latinate origin that means scarcity, but is that what you meant?
@@cTc10691 He meant "pause".
It can be interesting to compare less recent Finnish (which is not filled with obvious English-derived words) and Ancient Greek vocabulary. Some words that I've noticed bearing resemblance - sometimes deviating from official etymological explanations - are (taking just words that begin with K, for demonstration) καυχάομαι kehua/kehuskella (to boast), καινος kaino (shy about NEW things), καλος kallis (precious, valuable), κερδαίνω kertyä (an increase in something), κρίνω kuri-/kurittaa (to discipline). These are all probably derived from Indo-European.
How much of a percentage of the recent Finnish language are English-derived words though?
@AbsurdScandal Younger people speak a kind of finglish.
@Teitan4973 Interestingly enough, some think that a part of this is only a temporary phenomena of acquiring foreign words where they're currently in the pre-calque or pre-transliteration phase. Finglish looks like an interesting phenomenon to observe & see develop.
I would add to this the 2 strange coincidences: The "liian" ("λίαν" in ancient greek = much) and the suffixes for first and second plural verbs: "-mme" (-με in greek) and "-tte" (-τε in greek). I was so astonished noticing this.
Fascinating experiment! Never seen anyone else do such an in-depth analysis of lexical or etymological comprehension for English speakers when encountering texts in either one of these, our beloved classical languages.
5:31 But what percentage of the 60% Latin vocabulary is inherited from ancient Greek? No-one ever bothers to say that but it is probably an easily discoverable fact. Well maybe it isn't. Wouldn't it be fair to say that part of the difficulty is that the student of Latin only has to learn one version of Latin whereas there are a few dialects of ancient Greek thrown in the classical literature. Also I get the feeling that ancient Greek is perhaps much more irregular?
Latin has a handful of common words borrowed from Greek, but really very few. For the most part Greek influence on Latin literature seems to have been more stylistic (things like the borrowing of Greek metre), but much less borrowed vocabulary than you might expect. Of course there are also many words that are similar not because of borrowing, but because of common origin.
@@Philoglossos Hmmm.. perhaps the common origin would account for quite a few of those. It's just that whenever I check a word on Merriam-Webster (or perhaps another dictionary) which I recognize as Greek, it mostly says they are of Latin origin. Now that I'm writing this, however, I'm struggling to find examples of such words as I mostly come up with words which are traced back to Latin and to Greek before that. Hopefully at some point these aspects will become searchable in on-line dictionaries.
@@Stelios.Posantzis I'll give you some examples:
poēma - borrowing from Greek, and the native word 'carmen' is more common
pontus - borrowing from Greek, and the native word 'mare' is more common
hōra - borrowed from greek, in its more specific sense there's no native equivalent
āēr - Greek borrowing, native equivalents are either more specific or rarer
taurus/ταυρος - shared inherited word (compare Old Norse þjórr, Lithuanian taũras, Avestan staora, etc.)
jugum/ζυγον - shared inherited word, compare Sanskrit jugam, English 'yoke'
pēs/πους - shared inherited word (compare English foot, Sanskrit pā́t)
lupus / λυκος - inherited, compare 'wolf', Lithuanian 'vilkas', Sanskrit 'vrkah'.
Then there's some you wouldn't immediately recognize, like Greek ἕπομαι and Latin sequor.
In my experience as someone who knows Latin very well and is learning Greek actively, most shared vocab seems to be inherited and not borrowed, since both languages are quite archaic and preserve a lot from Indo European.
@@Philoglossos Thank you for these great examples. I didn't know about these Greek loans in Latin. My guess for a quick rule distinguishing between common words vs. borrowed words is that if the root of the word is identical, then it's borrowed whereas if the root has or or two phonemes changed, then it's common. There are always exceptions though, so perhaps it is safer to also consider the word endings.
Hi Luke,
Nice analysis, yet it seems to me you may have missed a few things.
First, on the calculation: that is not 12 times more to learn.
It is (100-5)/(100-60) = 95/40 = 2.375 times more.
Second, on the text example from Plato, you could add:
prepositions: why give προς, but not ἀπο, συν, περι, εκ, προ, ὑπο, and why "προς" in a compound but not alone?
περιιόντα: how about "ion" in chemistry?
συνεχώρησεν: why not χώρος as in isochoric and isochore, in thermodynamics and genetics?
αποδιδόναι: why not "don" as in donation? (common root)
εἶπες: how about "epic"? why did you say you stop doing those words?
χάριν: how about "eucharist"?
δρῶ: why not drastic, drama, dramatic?
ἐθελήσεις: there exists "Thelema", for a certain movement.
συμφέρον, συμφέρει: you hesitated, yet it is συμ- as in "symbol", -φέρον as in "periphery".
δίκαιον: δικ- as in "syndicate".
βόεια: isn't that understandable as of the same root as beef and bovine? (not to mention butter and Bosporus)
ὑπολαμβάνεις: ὑπο- as hypo-, λαμβ- from λαβ- as in "syllable", with a nasal infix.
So the valid point remains that the Greek words are at a higher register than the Latin ones.
Sincerely,
your Greek friend
Τρίπους is attested in Mycenaean, so "tripod" is one of the words with the oldest history in English.
I think you said "architect" at "τέκνον"; the actual root word is "τέκτων".
Same root though. Both mean create/give birth to.
I believe this explanation straight off. In comparison, as a Swede, Icelandic/Old Norse is definitely incomprehensible to us, but the speed at which I acquire vocabulary while studying it is crazy fast compared to Latin or other languages. Of course by my knowing English, Latin is in turn also easier than Greek.
Fascinating!
German would be also easy to learn for you since German was lingua franca in the Deutsche Hanse and so it influenced Swedish a lot. Unlike Norwegian or Danish that were fairly untouched by the Deutsche Hanse.
@@tamara3984 yes for sure!
how much more would it be if we count latin words that were loaned from greek?
Ancient Greek gives us only 5% of our English words? Ι am not so sure about that because a huge number of Latin words are loanwords from Greek that are counted as Latin, while in reality, they were originally Greek. The Oxford Companion to the English Language states that the 'influence of classical Greek on English has been largely indirect, through Latin and French, and largely lexical and conceptual...'. According to one estimate, more than 150,000 words of English are derived from Greek words. These include technical and scientific jargon. Telephone and cinematography are French-made words that use Greek components.... With well over 100k Greek words, that 5% figure looks false to me. It is more like 25% rather than 5%.
polyMATHY is a Greek word and hypocrites is another Greek word
i didn't realise jesse pinkman made latin videos!
i only jest, i'm sure this video will be very interesting, i've been looking into (ancient) greek lately and it's very interesting
As someone whose first language is German I feel in our language the distribution of Latin and Ancient Greek loan words is much more equal. We don’t have nearly as many Latin loan words in everyday vocabulary as English and so both Latin and Ancient Greek are much more restricted to scientific terms.
You brought up "βίος" as an example. Now while you might look for "organic" (Latin) produce in an American grocery store, in a German store they’ll stick a "Bio" label on the produce.
Organic is still ultimately derived from
Greek though.
Interestingly because (modern) Greek also happens to have a (relatively) very low content of Latin origin words, probably way lower than even German does (and the ones in Greek aren't even "fancy" or "educated" like the ones in English but rather banal words like spiti or porta, actually the latter might even be from Italian for all I know) it's usually very easy for me to recognize which English words are of Greek origin, or indeed which English words of Latin/Old French origin are actually Greek. ... "Organic" being one of them funnily enough 😅
I don't know if it's close to the video's topic, but I'd really like to share my thoughts on it. Being a Greek myself, as well as a language-nerd, I've always found learning English vocabulary challenging, maybe because of its extensive Latinate vocabulary. Memorizing words that were from Ancient Greek was relatively very easy for me, but they were extremely limited compared to the Latin ones, but as my passion for languages grew, as well as having bought the Lingua Latina book a couple of months ago, I feel like I finally could get the hang of it. E.g., I can link the English word "equestrian" to Latin "equus" (horse), or English "anniversary" to Latin "annus" (year) and I can't express how much I'm enjoying this feeling! 😊
You’re being extremely generous with the Greek translations. Unless somebody’s already a student of languages, and it’s familiar with the Greek alphabet, there’s no possible way that those words would be slightly familiar to the man on the street.
Nice video!
Something I have noticed is that if one learns or is associated with the vocabulary of 2-3 different IE languages from different branches, the cognate recognition percentage definitely goes up.
Some languages like the romance ones like to use greek and latin mixes where english would prefer germanic/french ones. Maybe a good literary example would be how Weltanschaung (worldview) is calqued into spanish as cosmovisión.
Take the word Ζυγός jugam in Sanskrit...it has etymology only in Greek..it comes from the Boeotian word δυγον ...ζυγος ...ζυγον δυγον...δυο+αγω the word ζυγωμα jugom is a deviration of the word ζυγος .
I learned in school that most of the Latin lexicon came into English through French after the Battle of Hastings (1066): The Norman King (Guillaume le Conquerant defeated King Harold).
His name was actually William in Norman, which was directly borrowed into English. There are actually a lot of differences between Parisian (what became French) and Old Norman (and then later Anglo-Norman in England). The pronunciation system (phonology) and the grammar were quite different, and much of the basic vocabulary of Norman was borrowed from Old Norse. I also believe that Norman did not have the same influence from Frankish that Parisian had (roughly ten percent of French).
If you know more Greek you could see that the latin words are not so Latin , and most of them have Greek etymology.
When you see the Greek text you dont underline all the lexicon that you meet.I inform you allmost all the words that you let exist in English via scientific terminology.
You can not make disinformation If you say 60 %οf English is Latin why dont you say that 30-35%of the lexicon that you think is Latin is Greek.?????
Learn etymology,learn etymology of the Latin lexicon ,and dont consider the Greek words as Latins.Allthe importanrt lexicon of Latin was Greek loans.They were more barbarians than Germanic people when they met ancient the Greeek civilization.
And lastly I imform you the their alphabet is another form of Greek alphabet of south Italy.
No, you are probably interpreting words with a common Proto-Indo-European origin as being “Greek” as opposed to Latin, both Latin and Greek coming from PIE.
10:58 What percentage of Latin does the 60% borrowed by English form then? That would be a better measure of vocabulary familiarity.
I noticed that many words from latin text, are in reality of greek roots. For example philosophia, is genuinely greek, but you counted it as a latin one. Same rhetoris, tragoedia, comoedia.
There are also latin terms that actually are of greek origin but it is not that easy to recognise them even by a native greek speaker. For example video comes from εἴδομαι but because of modern greek language doesn't use the traditional pronunciation we cannot detect that ἰ sounds like vi, also audio comes from greek term αὐδή meaning voice but has stopped being in use except as an ingredient at composite words like άναυδος meaning speechless.
Γεια Κόστη, must of that is incorrect, I’m afraid. Firstly, words like philosophia were not counted as “Latin;” they were in the Latin text, and were comprehensible to the Anglophone reading Latin. That’s the measure.
Videō is *not* from Greek, but from Proto-Italic, from Proto-Indo-European, the same origin as the Greek words with εἰδ-. Ditto audiō which is *not* from Greek, but also from Proto-Italic from Proto-Indo-European.
@@polyMATHY_LukeMaybe you are correct about Proto-Indo-European roots, but still detectable through greek texts. Terms like philosophia rhetoris, tragoedia are greek 100% and adapted by Romans directly from Greek language 🙂
@@polyMATHY_Lukemy name is Κωστῆς coming from latin name Constantino. Χαῖρε
@@polyMATHY_Luke also Δρῶν δράσις for sure are detectable for english speakers, drastic, diadrastic, you can find lots of greek terms, but not on everyday english, mostly through scientific terms of higher value, like astronomy, literature, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, chemistry, physics etc.
Χαρίζου -> charisma. Κρέα-> creatine
Right! I forgot. Good going.
I was about to point that out, although instead of "charisma" I would present "charm" (λέμε "χάρμα οφθαλμών" πχ).
Krea, creature
I want to respectfully correct something you said. Feel free to disagree.
4:10 I don't think that the maths work like that. If you recognise 60% percent of a Latin text that means you don't recognise 40%. With ancient Greek that is 5% and 95% respectively. 95/40=2.375.
Although the real number would be a bit different because here I assumed that because about 60% of the English vocabulary comes from Latin, you would recognise 60% of Latin vocabulary. (same for Greek) That is probably not quite right, but is likely pretty close.
Another thing is that quite a few of these cognates are probably not recognisable at first but "make sense" once you know the English translation. Like "nunc". I didn't immediately recognise that is translates to "now", but now I can see the connection.
But of course, Greek is a much harder language to learn and this is one of the major reasons.
I see what calculation you’re doing, and that’s a valid way to understand it too, but that’s not what I meant to highlight here. This is instead what I wanted to highlight:
For any given set of 100 English words in the mental dictionary of an English speaker, 60 are from Latin and 5 are from Greek. Thus, how much more does our native lexicon help us when dealing with Latin vs. Ancient Greek texts? 12 times more.
As seen in the video, the three types of literature in my unscientific sample and analysis don’t seem to reveal these numbers: in Latin texts, we may recognize 70 or 80 words per 100, and in an Ancient Greek text 15 or 20. That’s definitely not a ratio of 12:1. And since the goal is reading fluency, which means achieving the magic number of 98% reading comprehension of true extensive reading, I’d say the latter type of figure is more important than the 60% from Latin, 5% from Greek. At best, the 12:1 is a clue to how much longer it might take to build up enough Ancient Greek vocabulary to be a fluent reader. Anecdotally, 12 times longer seems to be consistent with what I have observed in myself and others.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I am still not sure of that. The ratios you showed in the texts are not 12/1. They are closer to 4/1.
The reason why, for some English speakers, ancient Greek might indeed take 12 times longer to learn could be because it takes longer to before you get to the point where you can start reading and thus start learning new vocabulary more effectively. Though, if I remember correctly, you already spoke Italian at a decent level before you started learning Latin, which must have helped you a lot with Latin but not so much with Greek.
Also, from what I have understood once from this video (ruclips.net/video/gqDld1-dgI0/видео.html), ancient Greek has around three times as much grammar going on. That too takes a lot of time to learn and fully master.
Although he also says (in the video) that Greek has many more words.
Again. I am saying this with respect.
! What about those words that are initially Greek, and have passed into Latin?
Finally is it the Greek that little as a source into English??
Before I started intensively learning Latin, a page of Latin text seemed like a platter of familiar-looking words that I could only make sense of once I got the grammar under my hat. Plus a lot of the Latin words originally have a somewhat different sense than the modern ones.
Does anyone know a good source on how the Proto-Indo-European language got its "-os, -us, -as, -is, -es etc." endings in the nouns and adjectives? These "-Vs" endings are the most notable feature of the old Indo-European languages, retained today in the Baltic languages, but lost elsewhere. Why did most of the modern Indo-European languages lost these "-Vs" endings?
I’m certainly no expert on this, so take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve heard a theory that the ancestor of PIE may have been an ergative language.
Marking the nominative is rare cross-linguistically- usually the nominative is the unmarked, most basic form of the noun. But in ergative languages, the object is unmarked by default and the agent is marked explicitly. In addition, there’s evidence that PIE used to have a simpler animate-inanimate gender distinction, as was preserved in Hittite for example.
Often in animacy-based gender systems, the animate nouns take nominative-accusative marking, while inanimate nouns take ergative-absolutive marking. After all, it’s assumed that an animate noun is the one doing the verb, so there’s no need to mark it. If the opposite is true, and the inanimate object is performing the verb, then this unusual situation needs extra marking to make things clear.
Compare the neuter gender in Latin, for example, whose nouns decline identically in the nominative and accusative. Since neuter nouns are usually not the ones doing the verb, there’s no need to mark them explicitly as the object. If you had a sentence with three words: “dog,” “rock”, and “see,” in any order, the assumption is that the dog is the one seeing the rock. If the unexpected is true, and the rock developed sentience and grew eyes, then the accusative case on “dog” (canis > canem) serves to highlight this in a nominative-accusative language. If neuter nouns in Latin were ergative-absolutive, then the ergative marking on “rock” would help to reinforce this even more.
Perhaps in the transition from pre-PIE to PIE, the old absolutive (unmarked) forms of the noun were lost entirely, and these new nominative endings in -s (which were the old ergative endings) spread by analogy to become the default on animate/masculine nouns. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know for sure what happened, but imo ergativity shenanigans are a fairly reasonable explanation.
As for why most IE languages have lost the -s marking- it’s the same explanation I gave above. Marking the nominative is both very strange and unnecessary, so it makes sense that this ending would be the one to get lost first. But also, the -s ending is preserved in Greek and Icelandic (as -ur) for example, so I’m not sure what you mean by “lost elsewhere.”
@@DustyKun123Thank you very much for the exhaustive answer.
I also wonder whether these PIE case endings are etymologically related (cognates or borrowings) to the case suffixes in other non-Indoeuropean languages, for example several case suffixes in Georgian are also in the form of "-Vs".
"But also, the -s ending is preserved in Greek and Icelandic (as -ur) for example, so I’m not sure what you mean by “lost elsewhere.” "
My mistake, posted the comment too fast and too late I remembered the most obvious - the modern Greek of course. The majority of IE languages lost nominative case suffix, including those with free word order like Slavic.
@@IGLUPhylogeny Romance and Slavic languages all had a general tendency to delete word final consonants, just that in Slavic it failed to obliterate the case system because of vowel changes that also occurred. Germanic meanwhile tended to reduce unstressed syllables in general. Also, in Slavic it's not really true that there is no nominative suffix, it's more accurately described as a zero suffix. For one thing, it can resurface a hidden yer in the stem (Nom _pes_ to Gen _psa_ is a common one) or vowel length in West Slavic. For another, it doesn't only mark nominative singular of masculine nouns, it's also often genitive plural of nouns that have non-zero nominative singular ( _žena_ > _žen_ ), or imperatives of verbs sometimes.
Also, this is highly hypothetical on my end, but I notice that languages with stress accent have a stronger tendency to reduce or lose final syllables. PIE had a pitch accent, but Germanic and Italic replaced it with stress very early, while Slavic lost pitch relatively recently (and not in all languages), and Baltic of course still has pitch accent.
@@DustyKun123 Not that I disagree with the idea, and Pre-PIE ergativity does have some typological justification (Caucasus), but is it really the only valid explanation? Korean and Japanese both have nominative-marking particles, do we require that they come from ergative languages, too?
@@krupam0 I think there is pragmatic/discourse stuff going on in both Japanese and Korean that complicates things. The classic example is 像は鼻が長い (zou wa hana ga nagai - elephant TOP snout SUBJ is.long) ‘the elephant’s snout is long.’ Here, the subject marker “ga” is used to distinguish the topic (marked with wa) from the comment/rheme, not just to mark the subject. I only speak Japanese with any ability, but I know Korean works similarly in this regard. Also, “ga” used to be the genitive marker, which is fossilized in some toponyms and counter words. I’m not saying this discredits it as a subject-marking particle, but impressionistically it feels more like a discourse particle and less like a syntactic particle, if that makes sense. When case particles are used in Japanese, they’re often emphatic, not required (in the spoken language at least). We can do the same thing in English periphrastically, though it would sound weird, e.g. “As for Starbucks, chai tea is the drink that is best” or “Among my art club members, John is the one who is best at painting.” Anyway, even if Japanese and Korean do have a marked nominative, it IS still rare cross-linguistically.
“Est” = “is”; “et” = “and”; “tu” = “thou”.
Est = esti (εστί), et = te (τε), tu = su (συ) in greek!
Most of my Greek Knowledge is from Medical (Hospital) and Ecclesiastical (Church) Services.
A lot of people are arguing about how many of the Latin loanwords come directly from Greek, and I wanna address the counter argument that "we're talking about direct borrowings only". In that scenario, 60% of English definitely do NOT come from Latin. Around 28% of our lexicon is from French, 24% native, and only 22% directly from Latin. That number sneaks up to something that can be rounded up to 60 when you add Latin with all Romance loanwords, but by itself Latin is only at 22. So its either only direct loans, where it's 22% vs 5%, or its indirect loans too, where it's ~60% to ~25%
The word in ancient Greek, it has two "root themes". It goes like that Nom: Ζεύς, Gen: Διός (and more rarely Ζηνός), Dat: Διί (and more rarely Ζηνί), Acc: Δία (and more rarely Ζñνα), Voc: Ζεῦ. The Ζ- theme and the Δι- theme both derive from the same original protohellenic root, but were eventually differentiated, so that the former is used in nominative and voccative, and the latter in the oblique cases of ancient Greek
That is true, coming from Porto-Indo-European
@@polyMATHY_Luke Μέχρι να αποκαλυφθεί ότι η ινδοευρωπαϊκή θεωρία είναι δημιούργημα και όχι ιστορικά αποδεδειγμένη.
@@andrem1403 Άρχισαμε πάλι τες αερολογίες....
@AthrihosPithekos αυτό λέω να τις σταματήσουν. Δεν θα μας διδάξουν ούτε αυτοί ούτε οι μειοδότες Έλληνες την ιστορία μας και την γλώσσα μας. Και ας μας αποδείξουν την ύπαρξη των "Ινδοευρωπαίων" και όχι με αερολογιες επειδή κάποιους συμφέρουν αυτές οι θεωριες
@@AthrihosPithekos Αυτό λέω και εγω
Strictly speaking, "school" "rhetoric" and "philosophiam' are Greek words directly borrowed by Latin. I appreciate Greek will be harder for English speakers. Reciprocally, us Greeks have a clear disadvantage learning any other language. Besides having to learn a different writing system, we also have the vocabulary disadvantage compared to say the Germanic-Latin-Slavic ones which all seem to have so much more in common and a range of "easier" languages to choose from to learn. Strangely enough, I found Italian exceptionally easy to learn, fluent within less than a year. German, French, English and Dutch took a lot longer. But German and English helped enormously with learning Dutch. I can understand a lot of Spanish because of the French and Italian I am trying to learn Korean now, it's no harder than learning French or English.
I am sure one of the biggest obstacles in understanding Greek vs Latin is understanding the Greek script. Once it is transliterated into a Latin based script, i think its much easier as they are similar enough.
10:48
WHOLE LOTTA RED MENTIONED
How about if you didn’t count the Greek words borrowed into Latin as Latin, like comedy, tragedy, school and others? Then you’d see that the percentage of Greek words into English is much higher.
Ah, but I counted as comprehensible all manner of words, like “nunc,” that are not from Latin but cognate through Proto-Indo-European. The point is not to give credit to Greek, but to determine how comprehensible a Latin text is when contrasted with an Ancient Greek one.
@ ok, fair enough.
When you were doing the Latin text underlining I think Graeci/Graecorum should count, since the English ethnonym is definitely borrowed from Latin and its not the one used in Greek or several other languages... On the other hand, given how obviously Greek, "rhetoris" maybe shouldn't count(isn't that oratoria in Latin normally anyway?). Considering however it's presence in the text(alongside schola, philosophia, tragoedia and... ego) I'm kind of wondering how much of this kind of "recognition" a regular Latin speaker would have experienced while reading a Greek text?
If Greek is already ten times harder than Latin, something like Biblical Hebrew must be absolute torture
the grammar of hebrew is easier to learn
Personally, learning biblical Hebrew on-and-off, I've never really felt intimidated by it like I have been with ancient Greek.
How is possible for shepherd nomads to create something more complicated than Greek language which was being shaped for centuries by Greek writers as Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, Herodotus ....
You missed quite a few in this one. At 31:40 missed όλης and also συμπλέξαι (συν+πλέξαι, cf. apoplectic, apoplexy) at 32:04.
Also δημοτελής (δήμο- + -τελής) at 32:36 and perhaps σχεδόν (for those well versed in mathematical subjects; cf. scedastic),. συνοδίαν (cf. synod) and ταχέως (although again rather technical; cf. tachometer) at 33:08, μετά at 33:18, αριστεύς at 33:20, κάλλους at 33:21.
Obviously the difficulty with Greek is that the English speaker has to recognise the etymology of the Greek words whereas with Latin there is no such need. Quite a different level of difficulty. I would not expect the common English speaker to recognise the 2 or 3 letter root you underlined in many of the words.
How much harder is ancient greek compared latin in reality? I'm cypriot and learning latin was easier than ancient greek for me 😂😂
That’s very interesting! I’d love to hear more about this. Please write me an email.
Even if the percentages (60% and 5%) are correct, they are not really relevant for the point you are trying to make. Here's an example: the fact that 50% of humans are men does not mean that 50% of men are humans (100% of men are humans). Similarly, the fact that 5% of the words in the english dictionary are also in the ancient greek dictionary (english words with greek origin) does not mean that 5% of the words in the ancient greek dictionary are in the english dictionary.
We can notice the difference with some very basic math:
C = number of common words in english and ancient greek (english words with greek origin)
E = number of english words
G = number of ancient greek words
The percentage of 5% is the result of the division C/E, whereas the percentage that would be relevant for someone to know how many greek words they will recognise is the result of C/G.
It is also important to notice that if E is larger than G (that is, if english has more words than ancient greek, which may very well be the case), then the percentage of C/G (which we are interested in) is larger than the percentage of C/E which is 5%.
Therefore, it could be the case that english speakers can recognise more than 5% of ancient greek words, and all of the above also holds for latin of course.
Anyways, the video was really nice and I hope I helped a bit with the math! Greetings from Greece :)
Out of all germanic languages English has been influenced by latin the most thanks to the Norman invasion (Norman being French is a Latin-originated language). Hastings did the job ;)
Hello, Luke!
I am a big fan of your content and I would really like to translate your videos on Russian Language for our community. Of course, I would make sure everyone understands that you are the author, and I am just a translator. I would like to upload my translations on my RUclips channel. Please answer, do you give your consent?
Best Wishes,
Your fan
Hi there. No you may not, but thank you for asking permission; however, if you would like to write subtitles and email them to me, I will add them to the video.
Please do this analysis for Chinese learners of Japanese and Korean. I am curious which of the latter two has more Chinese loanwords.
I was told Greek is hardly a "Indo-european" language. Is Greek a indo-european language, if not how can we classify it?
I don't know who told you that, but Greek is absolutely Indo-European,
Ancient Greek is one of the most quintessentially Indo-European languages, retaining the -os nom. sing. ending, the augment, reduplication, and so many other traits.
@@sshult93 Thank you for your reply, I thought so.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thank you for your reply, I learn so much from your videos.
Sounds like a rather unhinged claim. Perhaps whoever made that claim was trying to over emphasize the influence of non-IE languages on Greek (the so called Pre-Greek) that we don't really see in other families, but it's still at most about as accurate as claiming that English isn't Germanic.
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤ you are a great teacher. ❤❤❤❤
"Else" is a cognate of "αλλος".
"Ακουσαι" contains "ους", and "hear" contains "ear". This is no coincidence; they're cognates. "Ακουσαι/hear" is found only in Hellenic, Greek, and maybe Tocharian.
With 60% of Latin vocabulary, I always ask myself whether modern English shouldn't actually be considered a hybrid Latino-Germanic language, and whether ethnic British don't want to recognize that just because they are notoriously racists towards southern Europeans.
In terms of lexical recognition, I think you underlined too many words for the Latin. But I guess it depends on what kind of person you're asking. I do think more people would know cum than vir or dicere and deponere because although they are cognates, their relation to english is hidden until you've already learned the meaning of the word. Many of the other words like ingenio would probably be fairly obvious to a layman as long as they know the word ingenious.
It's not gonna be 10 times more difficult to learn Greek (Russian is not 10 times more difficult than Spanish!), but it might very well be more than twice as difficult.
What indoeuropean are you talking about ..
this is afalse theory..
The word Ζυγος you mentioned it has etymology only in the Greek language ...Ζυγος derives from the verb ζευγνυμι (zeugnumi) means to join together, ζεύγος a couple, ζεῦξις, put two things together and more
Yoke? Based on the word's Wiktionary entry.
For recognizing Greek, it seems one would have an advantage with a medical or otherwise scientific background.
Absolutely
When are you going to take on Hebrew? ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤ I ❤❤❤❤❤
In the Greek text you forgot χάριν - charisma, Eucharist.
Flawless ALI plug lol
60%??? that's combining both words of Latin origin and of French origin, taking only words directly loaned from Latin the percentage is around 30% not 60%
Evidently it’s indeed 60%; the non-Latin contribution from French is also there, Frankish words like guard or non Classical Latin words like turn. But the 30% from French is almost entirely directly from the parent language, meaning Latin, which still allows us great ease of comprehension. Plus 30% taken from literary Latin.
But, quite a lot of those borrowings from French do have their origin in Latin.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I agree, but you literally said you're not counting words loaned through Romance languages and only ones from Literary Latin.
Salve! :D
Salue et tu.
Han Solo -- I never got that connection before!
lol
How to is 5% when you’ve underlined so much
naaaaaahh! You needed to have a naive person do that experiment.. I wouldn't have known half those Latin words and I have a BA in philosophy.
I was being generous both for the Latin and Greek; someone who doesn’t know Latin or Ancient Greek would not automatically recognize all of the roots here, but as one learns these languages they would be able to connect the various vocabulary words with English terms. That’s the analysis I made.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I guess that's true.. I've been working on Koine with the hope of reading Church Fathers.. After a year I do recognize cognates I wouldn''t have at first. Maybe in a couple years Latin will seem easy..
This makes me cold 🥶😂
That’s Greek for ya
τραγικοκωμῳδία,πρόλογος, deus also comes from Διος and dont talk to me about indoeuropean theory it doesn't exist. That supposedly Indo-European language is the proto- Greek it self...no question about this...
That is incorrect: Proto-Into-European is the source of Latin and Greek.
Cum de fenestra corvus raptum caseum comesse vellet, celsa residens arbore, vulpes hunc vidit, deinde sic coepit loqui:
“O qui tuarum, corve, pennarum est nitor! Quantum pulchritudinis corpore et vultu geris! Si vocem haberes, nulla prior ales foret”.
At ille stultus, dum vult vocem ostendere, emisit ore caseum, quem celeriter dolosa vulpes avidis rapuit dentibus.
Tunc demum ingemuit corvi deceptus stupor.😛
A bit too generous with the recognition for a learner
Hi Luke what about word Okey. O.k it's truth that it's coming from greek όλα καλά we use to say in greek just οκ when we agree we something I need your opinion about it
OK is most likely NOT from Greek; there are several etymologies in wikipedia regarding its origins
Love both Greek and Latin. But Greek words are more powerful for me.
I asked chatgpt about and it gave me the following answer:
Scientific and technical terms in English are heavily influenced by Greek and Latin. While precise percentages can vary, here's a general breakdown:
Greek Influence in Scientific Terms
Approximately 90% of scientific terms in English have Greek origins.
This is especially true in disciplines like medicine, biology, and astronomy (e.g., "biology" from Greek bios meaning life, and logos meaning study).
Latin Influence in Scientific Terms
Latin accounts for a significant portion of the remaining terms, often related to taxonomy, legal, and technical writing.
Overall, a majority of technical vocabulary is Latin-based, including fields like chemistry and law.
Overall Impact
In the field of science, 90% or more of terms are from Latin and Greek combined. Latin tends to dominate taxonomy and standardization, while Greek often provides foundational roots for theories and methodologies.
including indo european words is cheating.
Dicere docere hic
Hickory dickory dock
In the Greek text you underlined around 20% of the words.. That's four times more than the 5% you originally claimed an English speaker would know.
That’s right. Did you get to the part where I talked about this discrepancy?
We expected there to be a different result, since the analysis I do in the video is measuring something quite different than English lexical inventory. 60% lemmas from Latin and 5% lemmas from Greek simply shows us that an English speaker may recognize roughly 12 times as many unique roots and other word-forms in any given text. But that text may use and re-use any of those lemmas an unlimited number of times; thus, while the variety of Latin lemmas in English is higher, the few Greek lemmas we do have are repeated enough in the Ancient Greek texts sampled in my video to give us 20% lemma recognition. Do you see difference? It’s fascinating.
5% is the amount of english vocabulary that is of greek origin. The fact that 20% of a greek text could be recognizable to an english speaker has nothing to do with that. You’re comparing apples and oranges.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thank you for the explanation I must have missed that part. So are these 5% of words just the ones that come directly from Greek? What about Greek words that come through Latin or French for example that would also be recognisable to an English speaker even though they arrived in English via an intermediary language. For example anchor or butter. Are these included in the 5%? As a bilingual native English and Greek speaker I feel that I can see the Greek origin in a lot more than 5% of English words.
What are you saing French has more latin word th english go back to school please.
You must have misunderstood me. French naturally has an even greater amount of Latin words, upwards of 75% or more I believe. French words of non-Latin origin are also a part of English, but they contribute far less than those that go back to Classical Latin. That’s what my comment meant. Do you follow now?
miniphe47 Lern hough 2 çpel
English is my third language how many language do you speak or write
@@miniphe47 Point well-taken. My apologies.
Saying 60% of english words are from latin is totally misleading many people. Hearing this many people think that it would means that english is mostly made of latin words, and as such should be more or less be seen as a romance language, or at least a mixed language. It is not.
This thing is that this number concerns the total number of latin-based words found in english dictionary. Many of them are rarely used, and even many are unknown to an average speaker. Of course there are still apart of these latin-based words that are commonly used, but they would never form a majority of a normal text. In some academic fields where the vocabulary can be more « intellectual » they could be a lot of them but even then all gramatical link words that make a give meaning to the concepts would still be almost 100% germanic. In a common average english speech, the number of latin-based words are less than 5%, which is far to make english romance of even ixedd germanic-romance as so many people would like to think.
" the number of latin-based words are less than 5%"
That sounds like complete bullshit.
Please share your source for the 5% claim.