% of English words from Latin and Greek

[Robin Hamilton]

> This is digging up very old and unreliable memories, but I believe I =20
> read at some point that about 50 percent of English vocabulary was =20
> Latinate in origin (including all those French words the Normans =20
> introduced) and 45 percent Anglo-Saxon in origin, while only about 5 =20
> percent came from third languages.
        [SNIP]
>
> Stephen Hughes

I wonder, whatever the percentages given were and whatever text they were
derived from, if they could have, in the days before computers, been
anything other than impressionistic?  Now, it should be possible to examine
the contents of the online OED and determine, based on the etymologies
given, where any particular word came from.

But even that apparently objective approach would be open to objection, as
it would include obsolete words.  Therefore, as a first approximation to a
serious anwer to the question, it would have to be time-stamped -- "The
English language in 1000 / 1500 /2000 included X% of words derived
{directly} from Latin."  (The {caveat} signals the problem of Latin terms
derived from a French [or Italian, or whatever] intermediary.  And geography
as well as time is perhaps also a factor, when we consider that Scots
developed as a separate and distinct branch of English, more than a dialect,
after at least the early fifteenth century.)

But there are still further problems in even this more apprently objective
counting.  What _is_ a word?  A semantic item, in which case perhaps all
varieties of the personal pronoun would be subsumed under "I" (we he she
it), one "word"?  But this would disadvantage English (which provides all
the words of this nature) at the expense of Latin, while the opposite
approach, counting each and every inflectional form as a separate word,
would in turn disdavantage Latin in this race.

So even if we restrict our answer to "English as found in the country of
England in the year 1950," there are already problems.

I've deliberately avoided the phrasing, "English as _spoken_ in the country
of England," since it begs the question of just what is to be included.
*All scientific and medical terminology?  Botany would skew the sample
wildly.

Even on the level of the individual speaker, there would be problems, as the
number of words recognised is larger than the number of words used.  So
which would we count?

I don't think it would be impossible to get some sort of significant answer
to a question regarding the proportion of foreign versus native origins of
English terms at any particular time and place, but it would have to be
couched carefully, and hedged with qualifications, to be anything other than
a nonsense question with meaningless answer.

Robin Hamilton

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