I believe languages like Latin, and German, as well as a several others greatly improve your knowledge of English. The introduction to the our dictionary "New Webster's" (1991) has a detailed history of the development of the English Language as I'm sure most do. I took the time to read it and was surprised at how many words are "borrowed" or have been transformed from other languages. Here is an excerpt from my dictionary for those interested, the whole list is incredible:
English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Indo-European is the major linguistic family in the world, in that languages belonging to it have the widest geographic distribution and are spoken by the greatest number of people.
1)Indo-European-divided into eastern and western.
a)Chief languages of the western group, to which English belongs, are Celtic, including the ancient tongue of the Gauls, whom Caesar conquered; the modern non-English languages of Wales, Ireland, the Highlands of Scotland, and the Isle of Man, and the language of Brittany, in Northwestern France;
b) Germanic, consisting of English as well as Gothic, German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and local dialects spoken in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland;
c)Greek, including the ancient and modern Greek languages, and dialects;
d)Italic, consisting of Latin with its modern descendants, the Romance languages-the chief of which are French, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, and Romanian.
The English language has vast debts. In any dictionary some 80% of the entries are borrowed. The majority are likely to come from Latin, and of those more than half will come through French. A considerable number will derive directly or indirectly from Greek. A substantial contribution will come from Scandinavian languages, and a small percentage form Portugese, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. The vocabulary has grown from the 50,000 to 60,000 words in Old English to the tremendous number of entries- 650,000 to 750,000 -in an unabridged dictionary of today.
The number of languages spoken in the world may be estimated at about 5,000. No definite figure can be given for two reasons: the incompleteness of our knowledge of human speech varieties and the definitional vagueness of the term "language" itself, as distinguished from dialect.
**********************************************************************Note: Many other languages have contributed also: like Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, of the ones that I personally know. Words like admiral, algebra and others I can't remember are derived from Arabic words. There are many other languages which I am not sure of but could have related words in English. There are countless words being developed every day for specific uses by industries like computers and others. ********************************************************************** |
