[OC] English words. Where do the come from?

Posted by cavedave

3 comments

  1. The top most used 1000 English words are of German origin and after that it is French words that dominate. I remember hearing this and I want to see if it is true. Is English really a French Creole?

    Wordlist First lets get the 2000 most common words from Contempory Fiction theres lots of possible wordfrequency lists

    Data from wiktionary. Boththe frequencies and most of the etymologies [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/Contemporary_fiction](https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wiktionary.org%2Fwiki%2FWiktionary%3AFrequency_lists%2FContemporary_fiction)

    Python matplotlib code and the analysis code up at

    [https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1QUnmjgOD76TpPO3IGB3Oz3SymL7pGEbQ?usp=sharing](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1QUnmjgOD76TpPO3IGB3Oz3SymL7pGEbQ?usp=sharing)

    Full classified word list up at [https://github.com/cavedave/EnglishWords](https://github.com/cavedave/EnglishWords) And I will fix errors as we find them. With 2000 words some will be wrong. And some will not be possible to get right. There is words that academics are still arguing about the origins of.

  2. That’s pretty interesting. What’s the cluster of Latin-derived in the middle of the second chart?

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