this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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I believe the actual number is around 25-30%. Blame the Norman invasion.
But French is like 80% Latin roots so you can blame the Romans before that.
Also yeah the crazy number of synonyms is a peculiarity of English because it also has strong influence from Old Germanic, Latin (more directly), Greek, even a bit of Sanskrit.
To add to your point, English is an amalgamator of words from many other languages. When another language has a word without a perfect English equivalent, English tends to adopt it, allowing words like shampoo and karaoke to become part of our language too. It’s a good part of the reason that English has more words than most other European languages
English breaks most of its own rules to begin with, and we seem to delight in finding ways to toy with the language even more.
Also arabic and other semitic languages
Latin is at least pronounced just like its written.
The french took those words, threw away everything but the root, added 50% more vowels than necessary and drew a few symbols over certain letters to change the pronunciation.