Language – Latin

5 Responses to “how has the latin language influenced the english language?”

1. Rosa L Says:
   November 19th, 2009 at 3:59 am

   Latin influenced by Sanskrit? Sanskrit the oldest known language? That’s just flat wrong. Greek is a major contributor to English? Minimal at best. .

   To begin, English is a Germanic language; Low West Germanic. Its closest relation is Frisian, spoken along the North Sea coastal area.

   However, most of its words (not its structure) may be traced to Latin. Sources vary, but something in the 60% – 70% range of the words in the language are Latin-based. That’s a little misleading in that the words you most often hear and see in normal communication are much more likely to be of pure Germanic heritage.

   At any rate, there are four generalized sources for Latin influence in English.

   1. It was there at the start. Before the Germanic peoples moved to the island, their language had already picked up a few words from the Romans. Latin ’strata’ became German ‘Strasse’ became West German ‘Straat’ became English ’street’. There are a few words in this category. As a subset of this, there were a very, very few traces of Latin left on the island from Roman days. Total contribution of these early sources is small.

   2. In 1066, William of Normandy defeated the English and became the ruler of England. He and his nobles spoke Norman French – that’s not the French of Paris, but it was still a Latin-based language. They were the rulers; the English the ruled. They refused to learn English, so to communicate (and survive) the English had to learn at least some French. The French words came into general use, but not the French language – English remained the base. This accounted for by far the greatest number of Latin-based words.

   3. Coined words. Whenever a new word had to be coined to fit a need, the primary source was Latin. Latin was the language of the universities for hundreds of years after the fall of the Roman Empire, and even today is used in scientific naming conventions. That practice continues today. We have our audio and video systems in our cars and homes. Pure Latin – ‘audio’ = I hear; ‘video’ = I see; perfect classical Latin.
   This source is second only to the Norman French as a provider of Latin-based words.

   4. Subsequent borrowings. English was never reluctant to borrow from other languages. Since many of the European languages were Lati-based, borrowing from them brought in even more Latin roots. Just look at the narrow field of music and what we borrowed from Italian – piano, alto, prima donna, opera, operetta, libretto, solo, and on and on. All of these are Latin-based.

2. keshequa87 Says:
   November 19th, 2009 at 3:59 am

   The English language was primarily derived from Latin.

3. Bowshould Says:
   November 19th, 2009 at 3:59 am

   influenced……hmmmmm

4. TheFlowerLady Says:
   November 19th, 2009 at 3:59 am

   Well, as you may know, Latin was the official language of Rome and the Roman Empire which contained most of the Mediterranean, Middle East, Egypt, much of Europe and even Great Britain. Therefore much of each of the European languages have their word base in Latin roots. What this did and still does is to enable the various European (i.e, French, Spanish)languages to share verbs and nouns all of which have evolved into the current English language. However you must not count out the contribution of the Greek language (ancient Greek that is) which has also given much to the European and English languages itself. It is from these two languages that most of the current English language evolved from and much of it has it’s basis in them.
   When I was growing up (and studying Latin/Greek) someone either told me verbally or I read it someplace, the saying that if you understand Latin, that is the basis of many languages which is true as I said, of French, Spanish, Italian, etc. (actually, it read more like "if you know Latin, you know all languages" but that was many many years ago!)

5. Madrugada Says:
   November 19th, 2009 at 3:59 am

   Latin has influenced English through many avenues, especially through Normandy French, Celtic, and German, the languages that directly formed the English language. These languages and others were here before English, therefore their languages influence English more than Latin. Actually Sanskrit which is the oldest known language, influenced Latin, so it also influences English in a round about way. You would be better off going to a library to research linguistics to learn about the origins and development of world languages (there are about 6,000 languages and dialects!)