I believe the actual number is around 25-30%. Blame the Norman invasion.
But French is like 80% Latin roots so you can blame the Romans before that.
Also yeah the crazy number of synonyms is a peculiarity of English because it also has strong influence from Old Germanic, Latin (more directly), Greek, even a bit of Sanskrit.
To add to your point, English is an amalgamator of words from many other languages. When another language has a word without a perfect English equivalent, English tends to adopt it, allowing words like shampoo and karaoke to become part of our language too. It’s a good part of the reason that English has more words than most other European languages
English breaks most of its own rules to begin with, and we seem to delight in finding ways to toy with the language even more.
Latin is at least pronounced just like its written.
The french took those words, threw away everything but the root, added 50% more vowels than necessary and drew a few symbols over certain letters to change the pronunciation.
I love reading about Japanese wordplay in manga when the scanlator is solid but only because I don’t have to converse in it. Still at least it is not tonal.
in most cases language should minimize unneeded complexity imo
having 4 differently spelled words that mean the same shit but with slightly different hyper-specific use cases seems stupid
i bet it is French root
We’re talking about English here.
It breaks pretty much all of its own rules, and arguably is the most unnecessarily complex widely spoken language.
and something like 80% of those words are fucking French root (complete anger driven ass-pull number)
I believe the actual number is around 25-30%. Blame the Norman invasion.
But French is like 80% Latin roots so you can blame the Romans before that.
Also yeah the crazy number of synonyms is a peculiarity of English because it also has strong influence from Old Germanic, Latin (more directly), Greek, even a bit of Sanskrit.
To add to your point, English is an amalgamator of words from many other languages. When another language has a word without a perfect English equivalent, English tends to adopt it, allowing words like shampoo and karaoke to become part of our language too. It’s a good part of the reason that English has more words than most other European languages
English breaks most of its own rules to begin with, and we seem to delight in finding ways to toy with the language even more.
Also arabic and other semitic languages
Latin is at least pronounced just like its written.
The french took those words, threw away everything but the root, added 50% more vowels than necessary and drew a few symbols over certain letters to change the pronunciation.
Haha you would love the Japanese language.
One character can have multiple meanings, and different pronunciation. 一 (ichi) vs 一つ (hitotsu) for instance.
And then there are the puns. So many puns.
I love reading about Japanese wordplay in manga when the scanlator is solid but only because I don’t have to converse in it. Still at least it is not tonal.
Welcome back, Webster.