I agree that Old English words are the lifeblood of our language – and I’m always telling my clients to use them instead of what the great Alistair Cooke described as ‘pompous Latinisms’.

Why ‘commence’ when you can ‘begin’? Why say ‘alternatively’ when ‘on the other hand’ sounds so much more human?

Sue’s remark that “50% of the words we’re using here were stolen from other languages” displays a rather odd view of the way languages develop.

She makes it sound as though our modern vocabulary (or should that be ‘word-hoard’?) has been ransacked from poor, subdued foreign nations as part of our nasty imperial past.

That – like the Elgin marbles – we should probably give all those pilfered words back.

(Empire does play a small part in our language’s richness, of course, but it’s our past as an invaded island that on the whole created the language we speak today).

And as for the idea that a single man – however talented – invented 50% of our language?

If that were the case, I think Shakespeare would have found it very hard to make himself understood to his contemporaries!

I see what you are saying, but I think that you are looking at the English language in an extremely heterogeneous way. There are very few “pure” words in the English language.

As you point out, many of our words come from Latin or Greek or French or Norse or so on. But in most cases, the word is then filtered and changed — literally anglicized. One of your examples is “language” from the French “langue”. But it is important to state the obvious: it is *not* langue, but language.

(As an aside, it should be mentioned that many French words ultimately come from the Latin as well. Many of our words have been filtered several times before becoming the words they are today.)

So even if the etymology of the word goes back to a different language, it is still ultimately and distinctly an English word. Which is a nicer way of say that we have an almost exclusively bastardized language (and therefore few pure words).

In a way, old English has also been “anglicized” and morphed into modern English. I think that at the heart of it, old English is a bit of a misnomer since it is so completely different than the language we speak today. Yes, there may be a link to modern English through middle English. But even those words of old English descent are filtered through Latin and French, etc. influences.

There is no denying the profound impact old English had as a basis of our language. But it is sort of like flour to bread — the changes are so absolute and so reliant on other outside forces that it really isn’t the “father” of modern English any more than Latin or French or any other language. It is an important ingredient, but simply an ingredient nonetheless.

Great post though — very thought (and perhaps debate?) provoking!

~Graham