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[not verified in body] [4] [page range too broad] English borrowed many words from Old Norse, the North Germanic language of the Vikings, [5] and later from Norman French, the Romance language of the Normans, which descends from Latin. Estimates of native words derived from Old English range up to 33%, [6] with the rest made up of outside ...
English words gave way to borrowings from Anglo-Norman following the Norman Conquest as English lost ground as a language of prestige. Anglo-Norman was used in schools and dominated literature, nobility and higher life, leading a wealth of French loanwords to enter English over the course of several centuries—English only returned to courts of law in 1362, and to government in the following ...
Many English writers of the 19th and 20th centuries extolled the virtues of "strong" Anglo-Saxon words such as foreword over the "weak" Romance word preface. French , German , Greek and Latvian are known for their preference for coining words using native roots (often calques ) over borrowing foreign words; some are more successful than others.
Throughout its history, English has not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words. Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing ...
The English language has borrowed many words from other cultures or languages. For examples, see Lists of English words by country or language of origin and Anglicisation. Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the original phonology even though a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English.
English has generally preserved the original spelling when borrowing words; and even more importantly, English began to be widely written and printed during the Middle English period: the later development of modern English included a Great Vowel Shift and many other changes in phonology, yet the older spellings, which are no longer phonetic ...
English does have some words that are associated with gender, but it does not have a true grammatical gender system. "English used to have grammatical gender. We started losing it as a language ...
In linguistics, borrowing is a type of language change in which a language or dialect undergoes change as a result of contact with another language or dialect. In typical cases of borrowing, speakers of one language (the "recipient" language) adopt into their own speech a novel linguistic feature that they were exposed to due to its presence in a different language (the "source" or "donor ...