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April 16

Number of native English root words

How many are there? déhanchements (talk) 01:36, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What counts as native? Anglo-Saxon? Was the language of the Angles the same as that of the Saxons? Is Anglo-Saxon itself a blend of two languages? If you go by the earliest known populations in what is now England, you'd be dealing with some sort of Celtic language. Is that the "native" English? The Norman conquest and rule changed the nature of the "English" language considerably, is post-conquest English really the "same" language as pre-conquest? --Khajidha (talk) 03:02, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A possibly pedantic correction: the earliest inhabitants of "England" that we know the language of were Celtic, but there were earlier populations that didn't speak Celtic languages. Iapetus (talk) 09:15, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Modern philologists tend to refer to Old English rather than the outdated 'Anglo-Saxon' (though of course the Anglo-Saxons spoke a – or several – variety/ies of Old English).

I think we can take it that by "native English" the OP means words stemming from Old English, but not from British Celtic languages (of which relatively few were adopted into Old English – see List of English words of Brittonic origin), nor from French and other continental languages introduced after the Norman conquest of England, nor directly from Latin introduced by churchmen and scholars. (Perhaps the OP will care to elucidate.)

However, it should be bourne in mind that:

(a) the blend of originally continental dialects subsumed under 'Old English' were part of the West Germanic language family (as modern English still is) which ultimately shares with Latin (and its Romance descendents such as French) an ancestry in Proto-Indo-European; and

(b) some words were adopted into Germanic languages directly from Latin before the 5th-century migration into Great Britain resulting in Old English.

Consequently, it is not always obvious whether the antecedent of a given word in modern English is a post-Conquest introduction, a pre-migration introduction from another PIE language, or an authentic West Germanic form with cognates in other PIE languages.

As to the OP's question, it is somewhat addressed in the article linked immediately above in its Section 6.2, and by the separate article List of English words of Anglo-Saxon origin. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.2.132 (talk) 06:10, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

To elaborate, I mean root words from Old English. déhanchements (talk) 07:26, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

See, for one place, File:Origins of English PieChart.svg, which indicates that about 26% of English comes from "Germanic" sources, which would give an upper bound on words of Old English origin (Middle English being defined essentially as post-Norman-Conquest English, after the incorporation of Norman French elements). To be sure, some non-trivial number of these words may have come from other sources, such as Norse or Dutch or been later adoptions from Modern German, but the bulk of that 26% would be Old English roots. --Jayron 32 14:02, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]