While English is a Germanic language, 41% of English words (ranked by frequency)... | Hacker News

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		gilgoomesh on April 30, 2014 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Uncleftish Beholding: English minus the non-German... While English is a Germanic language, 41% of English words (ranked by frequency) come from French, making French the largest source of words in English, not German (which comes in at about 35%). Of course, removing all non-French words would be worse since English pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions are mostly German derived. According to Wikipedia, 97% of the top 100 words in English are German derived. The loss of German would leave little to "glue" a sentence together. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Word_origins

judk on April 30, 2014 | [–]

How much is 97% of 100, approximately?

stavros on April 30, 2014 | | [–]

About 95.

sliverstorm on April 30, 2014 | | | [–]

That's about 97% accurate!

vidarh on April 30, 2014 | [–]

To nitpick: Germanic, not German. Modern German looks quite different.

ithkuil on April 30, 2014 | [–]

To nitpick even further: something is Old French, something else is Middle French, which are quite different than modern French as well.

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