--- In cybalist@..., "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:
>
> Roma:
> >i looked at a couple of langiuages sites a few dauys ago
> >and saw english listed among the german group .....but
> >french in the latin-romansch group ....but from what i
> >know on a word for word basis english is closer to french
> >than german ???
But a word-for-word basis gives the same weight to a word like
"parliament" as to a word like "the". In actual usage it is heavily
Germanic. For example, in your paragraph above there are 45 words, I
think only 7 are of Latin origin (couple, languages, sites, german
[twice], latin and romansch- maybe I missed one or two). See below
...[snip]...
GG> The basic grammar and vocabulary remains Germanic. Words
> such as "it", "he", "of" and "by" are all Germanic in
> origin. ...[snip]...
> Regardless of the French loans, the core of English owes
> more to its Proto-Germanic ancestor.
>
To further illustrate what Glen said, see
http://www.duboislc.org/EducationWatch/First100Words.html
http://www.duboislc.org/EducationWatch/Second100Words.html
http://www.duboislc.org/EducationWatch/Third100Words.html
From that site: "The First 100 Most Commonly Used English Words"
"These most commonly used words are ranked by frequency. The first 25
make up about one-third of all printed material in English. The first
100 make up about one-half of all written material, and the first 300
make up about sixty-five percent of all written material in English."
The words in those lists are overwhelmingly of Germanic origin.
Ned Smith