True, and what I said in my original
posting on Romanian balta was to the same effect. Much of the Slavic stratum in
Romanian consists of "technical" terms. But also the everyday Romanian words for
"love", "hour", "relative", "nation", "quarter", "hundred", "rich", "poor",
"wise", "stupid", "pay", etc., are borrowed from Slavic. This is what I call
heavy Slavicisation.
Please note that in your posting (cited
below) you used the following Latinate/Romance words:
language (2x), proportion (4x), dictionary
(2x), necessarily, random (ultimately Germanic, but via French), sample, text
(2x), classes (2x), common (2x), Rumanian, usage, bias, Latin, origin, Greek,
list (Germanic via French), rarely, used, scientific, term,
-papers.
There are two Norse borrowings (take and
big), so the Anglo-Saxon element is represented by
in (8x), a (4x), the (3x), of (4x), words
(4x), from, is (2x), not, same (2x), as (2x), some, are, much (2x), more (2x),
that (2x, including a typo for "than"), other, and, going, by, my, well,
towards, every, than, day, to, speech, or, news-
Even if we count tokens rather than types,
your English is very heavily Franco-Latinised.
:))
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2001 5:48 PM
Subject: Re: Odp: [tied] Romanian and Slavic
In a language X, the proportion of words taken from language Y in a
dictionary is not necessarily the same as the proportion in a random
sample of text. Some classes of words are much more common that other
classes, and in Rumanian going by proportion of usage in text may well
bias towards words of Latin origin. Same as: in English the proportion
of Greek words is much more common in a big dictionary that lists
every
rarely-used scientific term, than in day-to-day speech or in
newspapers.