• fleebleneeble@reddthat.com
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      23 hours ago

      It’s like 30%. Anything that ends is -tion and -ce, etc. Lots of stuff. Not to mention it’s technically a cretin language, English. Not fully Germanic. You can speak it in a Germanic way, but most don’t or won’t.

      • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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        21 hours ago

        30% is high. It may have a lot of words from French, but they aren’t necessarily pronounced in a French way - they often become Englishized (Germanized?).

        English is squarely a Germanic creole, with French being the single greatest contributor (courtesy of the 1066 Norman Invasion).

        Today an English speaker can nominally/marginally understand middle English, and learn it in perhaps a week or two. I learned both Spanish and French, and French is so removed from English I can’t say I know it even today.

        • fleebleneeble@reddthat.com
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          21 hours ago

          It doesn’t have to do with how it’s said more than influence generally. Some words in English simply wouldn’t exist that we use on a daily basis without French influence.

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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    21 hours ago

    No, it isn’t.

    It’s a Germanic language* with a strong French influence, and the influence of pretty much every other language (so much so that it arguably has as many loan words as most other languages have words).

    *A Germanic language is one that comes from the same precursor language that produced German.

    Any linguist would tell you this, it’s pretty surface-level stuff.

    If you really want to understand the story, check out The History of English podcast.