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The English language descends from Old English, the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic. [1] However, the percentage of loans in everyday conversation varies by dialect and idiolect, even if English vocabulary at large has a greater Romance influence.
The Germanic tribes who later gave rise to the English language traded and fought with the Latin speaking Roman Empire.Many words for common objects entered the vocabulary of these Germanic people from Latin even before the tribes reached Britain: anchor, butter, camp, cheese, chest, cook, copper, devil, dish, fork, gem, inch, kitchen, mile, mill, mint (coin), noon, pillow, pound (unit of ...
See English language word origins and List of English words of French origin. Although English is a Germanic language, it has a deep connection to Romance languages. The roots of this connection trace back to the Conquest of England by the Normans in 1066.
This list contains Germanic elements of the English language which have a close corresponding Latinate form. The correspondence is semantic—in most cases these words are not cognates, but in some cases they are doublets, i.e., ultimately derived from the same root, generally Proto-Indo-European, as in cow and beef, both ultimately from PIE *gʷōus.
As is typical of an Indo-European language, English follows accusative morphosyntactic alignment. Unlike other Indo-European languages, English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system in favour of analytic constructions. Only the personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class. English ...
The Romantic movement in English literature of the early 19th century has its roots in 18th-century poetry, the Gothic novel and the novel of sensibility. [6] [7] This includes the pre-Romantic graveyard poets from the 1740s, whose works are characterized by gloomy meditations on mortality, "skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms". [8]
The fifth rule of vocabulary in The King's English, published in 1917, suggests that writers should "prefer the Saxon word to the Romance". [8] In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell criticised the extensive use of "foreign" words in English. [12]
A similar distinction exists in the Germanic languages, which share a language area [citation needed]; German, Dutch, Danish and Icelandic use 'have' and 'be', while English, Norwegian and Swedish use 'have' only (although in modern English, 'be' remains in certain relic phrases: Christ is risen, Joy to the world: the Lord is come).