# Languages with most diverse origins/composition.



## Jacobtm

The English language, though nominally growing out of the root of Anglo-Saxon, has had a ton of influences over the years, and while estimates vary, it seems to be that only about 1/3 or so of the words in the English language come from Anglo-Saxon roots.

The only other languages I know much about are Romance languages, which seem to me in many ways to be closely related to Latin then English is to Anglo-Saxon. However, I'm no expert and this impression could be very wrong. I know that something like 10% of the words in Spanish have Arabic roots, and that currently Spanish is busy accepting a whole slew of English loanwords, whether they're officially recognized or not.

But since I don't know much about most other languages, I wonder if the diverse origins of English are rather unique, or if it's a common story for languages to be hugely influenced by external sources throughout their development into their modern form. 

For example, does German have anywhere near the number of words from Latin roots that English does? What about non-European languages?

Thanks for any and all insight,
Jacob


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## Cilquiestsuens

I think, well I'd rather say I have no doubt that a language such as Urdu has even a more composite origin than English...

The bulk of its vocabulary has been borrowed from *1. Persian 2. Arabic through Persian 3. Turkish through Persian.*

Although Urdu grammar is a typical North Indian language's (Sanskrit-derived with many influence of an unknown and probably dravidian substratum), more than 85% of its vocabulary is of the above origin...

In every language, when you take body parts, they almost all remain from the original language.... (i.e. in English, they all come from Old English, a germanic language, and not French or Latin). But in Urdu, even a few body parts have been borrowed from the above languages.... such as *baazu* (=arm, coming from Persian), *dil* (=heart, Persian).

Let me disagree with your statement that a third of the words of English are of Germanic origin... This may be true if you take a dictionary and count the foreign words (most of them French then Latin, and late Greek borrowings in sciences)... but in the normal day-to-day speech of an English native speaker (whether he is from the UK, the US, Canada, etc.), I am ready to bet that more than 50% of the words he uses (up to 60%, maybe) are actually English words (i.e. Germanic)...

In Urdu, even normal speech is overwhelmingly dominated by borrowed vocabulary....

Basic words, such as : ke ba'd (=*after *: Arabic), ke khilaaf (=*against*: Arabic), lekin (=*but*: Arabic), dobaara (=*again*: Persian) and plenty of others are borrowings.

When it comes to scientific or technical language,only Arabic and Persian words are left, not a single Indian-origin word is to be found in the massive vocabulary of Urdu.


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## Mahaodeh

I don't think this is unique to English; I know that Persian, Urdu, Hindi and Maltise are heavly influenced by various languages, although I don't know which is the most influenced or the extent of that influence.

---

I do understand that most of the time baic words come from the main language; but basic words do not constitute even close to 50% of the everyday used vocabulary, I'd say that they are more like 20% of vocabulary (in a dictionary, even less). Moreover, depending on your definition of 'basic words', even those can be borrowed, as an example, would you consider the words 'simple' and 'difficult' to be basic? My point is that saying that only one third of English is Anglo-Saxon does not really seem too far off to me.

However, I'm not saying that English has more borrowings than Urdo or that one third is the correct estimation, I'm just saying that English does, indeed, use a lot of borrowed words even in everyday speech.


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## Cilquiestsuens

In can ensure you that Urdu has more foreign words than English.... No doubt about that. I just wonder about other languages... What about Malay, Indonesian??????

Maltese, you say.... I thought Maltese was a form of Arabic???


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## sokol

Persian indeed is heavily influenced by other languages and by some even has been called the equivalent to English in Asia in this respect, but of course there are plenty of other examples.

Maltese is a Semitic language which evolved from Arabic dialects as spoken in the Maghreb; it is heavily influenced by Italian.

In German there are also a great many Latin and other Romance languages loans but the number of loans is not even closely comparable to English; interestingly in Austrian dialects there are plenty of Romance (especially French) loans which have an equivalent of Germanic etymology in standard language.

However, to *measure *the "diverseness" of a language is almost impossible, so it will be difficult if not impossible to ascertain which language is the most "diverse" one in this respect.


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## Frank06

Jacobtm said:


> The English language, though nominally growing out of the root of Anglo-Saxon, has had a ton of influences over the years, and while estimates vary, it seems to be that only about 1/3 or so of the words in the English language come from Anglo-Saxon roots.


This has been discussed in countless other threads.



> Does German have anywhere near the number of words from Latin roots that English does? What about non-European languages?


Wouldn't it be easier to enumerate the languages which had no influence from any other language? My guess is zero.
And the 6400 (or so) other ones: yes, they probably all were influenced by other languages. But I fail to see the point to make a competition out of it, as the title suggests.

Frank


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## TitTornade

Hi,
Japanese has borrowed the Chinese ideograms to be written.
The ideograms were not really adapted to write Japanese. So, almost each ideogram was used to write the Japanese word(s) that existed before AND to write the Chinese word(s) that was borrowed with prononciation adapted to Japanese.
So, Japanese contains many Chinese words...


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## arsham

Old Persian is known to have borrowed from
1- Median (northwestern Iranian language, ancester of the majority of the central Iranian dialects), e.g. vazraka- (MP wuzurg, NP bozorg);
2- Aramaic, e.g. mashka- (MP & NP mashk);
3- Babylonian, e.g. piru- (MP&NP pil, also NP fil);
4- Elamite, e.g. dipi- giving *dipiabara- (MPdibir, NP dabir) and dipiadaana- (MP NP divaan);

However, the number of these loanwords remains relatively low. Middle Persian has loanwords of various origins:

1-Greek, e.g. daftar, gonyaa(NP guniyaa), nargis (NP narges), pengaan, k(e)lid etc.
2- Sanskrit, e.g. shakar, chatrang, besh(pain) etc.
3- Parthian (another northwestern Iranian language assimilated to Persian by the early Islamic times), e.g. shaax(in the sense of horn), shaftaalug, waaxtan etc.
4- Aramaic, e.g. gabr etc.
5- Direct Avestan loanwords;

In addition to the aforementioned categories, New Persian has obviously a sizeable amount Arabic words, but also loanwords from

1- Parthian,  this language has played an important role in the formation of New Persian, e.g. aasidan, gusaan etc.
2- various Iranian languages e.g. talaajon (from Tabari), kalchidan (from Gilaki) etc.
3- Turkish, e.g. kornesh, chaaqu, chelik, qurbaaqe, yengi in the expression yengi doniyaa, also from Ottoman Turkish e.g. adliye, amniye, baladiye, tayyaare, enqelaab (in the sense of revolution), mellat (in the sense of nation) etc.
4- Sanskrit/Hindi, e.g. shoqaal(the propre Persian word being ture), jangal, gaari etc.
5- Additional Greek loanwords through Arabic, e.g. oqiyaanus, safsate, qalam, beytaar etc.
6- French, e.g. tur, zhandarm, aampul, guril etc.
7- English, e.g. taksi, kaampiyuter etc.
8- Russian, samaavar, kaalbaas, piraashki, eskenaas;
9- German, e.g. otobaan etc.
10- Chinese, e.g. chaay

However, I don't think that list compares to the one reflecting the origins of the loanwords in English, as English has borrowed words from nearly all the languages of the world!

PS. I also think that the figures 50-70% given for the amount of Arabic words in Persian are somewhat exaggerated, as there are even more Persian-Arabic/Turkish compounds, which would lower the number of pure Arabic loanwords!


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## origumi

arsham said:


> 7- Hebrew (through Arabic), e.g. eblis etc.


If you refer to Eblis (or Iblis) the Satan - this doesn't seem to be Hebrew. It's most likely derived from Greek "diablos", maybe via Syriac.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Eblis


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## arsham

origumi said:


> If you refer to Eblis (or Iblis) the Satan - this doesn't seem to be Hebrew. It's most likely derived from Greek "diablos", maybe via Syriac.
> http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Eblis




Thanks for the clarification, it's indeed of Greek origin. (I corrected my original post!)


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## palomnik

TitTornade said:


> Hi,
> Japanese has borrowed the Chinese ideograms to be written.
> The ideograms were not really adapted to write Japanese. So, almost each ideogram was used to write the Japanese word(s) that existed before AND to write the Chinese word(s) that was borrowed with prononciation adapted to Japanese.
> So, Japanese contains many Chinese words...



Actually, Japanese not only borrowed the ideograms.  It borrowed their pronunciation too, which is why most Japanese characters have at least two pronunciations - one native Japanese and one from Chinese.  Most non-colloquial vocabulary in Japanese comes from Chinese, or rather, it's better to say that it is based on Chinese word roots, since the Japanese coined a lot of terms which were later borrowed back into Chinese.

Chinese influence on literary vocabulary is pervasive in Vietnamese as well.  It is significant in Thai, although mostly in commercial terms or household items; most of the numbers above "2" are actually from Chinese, although Thai borrows most of its literary vocabulary from Pali.

Indonesian is heavily influenced in vocabulary by other Islamic languages, probably as much as Urdu is.  The same is true of Swahili, which also borrows the Arabic numbers above "5".

The idea of a language borrowing something as basic as another language's numbers would sound incredible if it weren't for the fact that it occurs all over the world.  I've already mentioned Thai and Swahili, and Japanese makes common use of Chinese numbers as well - more so maybe than native Japanese numbers.  Many Native American languages in Central and South America use Spanish numbers when you count past "3" or "4".


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## Forero

Here is the first sentence of this thread without the Anglo-Saxon words:

_~ ~ language, ~ nominal~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Anglo-~, ~ ~ ~ ton ~ influences ~ ~ ~s, ~ ~ estimates vary, ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 1/3 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~s ~ ~ ~ language ~ ~ Anglo-~ ~.
_
Here it is without the Latinate words:

_The English ~, though ~ly growing out of the root of ~-Saxon, has had a ~ of ~s over the years, and while ~s ~, it seems to be that only about 1/3 or so of the words in the English ~ come from ~-Saxon roots.
_ 
I think it is clearly the Anglo-Saxon words that tell us how the sentence fits together. _Of_ is only one word, but we use it a lot.

Other language families are not represented here.


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## sakvaka

Finnish: The homeland of all Finno-Ugric speaking peoples was situated near the river Volga in Russia. Ok, this is just a theory, but it's the best one I know. 

Our oldest loan words have been borrowed fron *Indo-Iranian* languages (jyvä, mesi, sata...). Our next neighbours were the *Baltic* people - we learned a lot from them (heimo, herne, seinä, silta, puuro, kirves, taivas...). After this we got influences from *Germanic* people (naula, rauta, keihäs, kuningas) and *Slavic* people (risti, pappi, Raamattu, ikkuna, saapas). 

During the modern era Finnish borrowed a lot of words from *Swedish* and *Russian*. However, most of them have been replaced with original ones and only a small part of our modern vocabulary is borrowed from other languages. 

Feel free to compare this with Swedish; I have read that over 2/3 of it has been borrowed from French, German or English!

Translations: grain, nectar, hundred, tribe, pea, wall, bridge, porridge, axe, heaven, nail, iron, spear, king, cross, priest, the Bible, window, boot, book


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## Flaminius

palomnik said:


> Actually, Japanese not only borrowed the ideograms.  It borrowed their pronunciation too, which is why most Japanese characters have at least two pronunciations - one native Japanese and one from Chinese.  Most non-colloquial vocabulary in Japanese comes from Chinese, or rather, it's better to say that it is based on Chinese word roots, since the Japanese coined a lot of terms which were later borrowed back into Chinese.


Since the early 19th century, the Japanese used Chinese characters as morphemes (to be pronounced with Sino-Japanese pronunciations) with which to calque the influx of European words for science and technology, administration, economy and so on.  Huge calquing efforts took place in China, Japan and Korea and each borrowed from the others.


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## palomnik

Flaminius said:


> Since the early 19th century, the Japanese used Chinese characters as morphemes (to be pronounced with Sino-Japanese pronunciations) with which to calque the influx of European words for science and technology, administration, economy and so on.  Huge calquing efforts took place in China, Japan and Korea and each borrowed from the others.



Thaks, Flam, I know that you know a whole lot more about this than I do.

But I was under the impression that most of the calquing effort took place in Japan, at least initially.  Am I wrong in that?


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## palomnik

Actually, if we include calquing as a foreign source of vocabulary for languages the list of languages making extensive use of borrowings expands exponentially.  As Sakvaka observes, a lot of Swedish words are from German, and most of these are calques, not direct borrowings.

A lot of Russian technical vocabulary consists of calques from Latin as well.


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## Sepia

Danish has lots and lots of loan-words - measured in percentage of the complete vocabulary probably a lot more than German. Many are French, many are of Greek, Latin, German or English or other origins. Words originating in languages from other continents exist but are rare.


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## sakvaka

palomnik said:


> As Sakvaka observes, a lot of Swedish words are from German, and most of these are calques, not direct borrowings.



This situation is also affected by another thing. Swedish, English and German are Germanic languages. It is very clear that they have to have at least some words in common. But Finnish deals with borrowings in another way. Unlike Swedish, it refrains from using foreign words.

 Knut Cannelin has generated this example sentence to show us how would Finnish look if it had received foreign words as eagerly as Swedish. The amount of loan words (marked in red) makes it difficult to handle even for a Finn, so I'm very sure that you would understand it better than I !

_"Moderninen kansanrepresentationimme rekryteerataan maassamme eksisteeraavista poliittisista partioista direktisten ja proportionaalisten vaalien kautta, joiden resultaatin usein dikteeraavat lokaaliset intressit ja egoistisetkin motiivit, representeeraten mitä heterogeenisempia kansanelementtejä ja totaalisesti divergeeraavia fluktuationeja meidän nationaalisessa elämässämme_"


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## arsham

Forero said:


> I think it is clearly the Anglo-Saxon words that tell us how the sentence fits together. _Of_ is only one word, but we use it a lot.
> 
> Other language families are not represented here.



You can make a similar argument about Persian or Turkish as well, but I think most people have understood the title of the thread in relation to the entire lexical corpus of a given language without gauging the relative importance of the foreign words.


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## trbl

sokol said:


> In German there are also a great many Latin and other Romance languages loans but the number of loans is not even closely comparable to English;



I disagree. I would guess that there is a cognate in German for about 80% of Latin and Romance-based English words. It's just that many words that are perfectly neutral and commonplace in English are considered very formal or have a more limited meaning in German.


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## sokol

trbl said:


> I disagree. I would guess that there is a cognate in German for about 80% of Latin and Romance-based English words. It's just that many words that are perfectly neutral and commonplace in English are considered very formal or have a more limited meaning in German.


You do have a point as there's a huge number of not very frequently used loans in German which are of Romance (esp. Latin) origin - most of them are scientifical and technical terms.

Of course, as you say, the difference is that many words of Romance origin are used in colloquial language in English.
And apart from that I still think that the number of Romance loans in English is by magnitudes higher than in German - but we would need statistics to find prove for this (which I don't have at hand).


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## olric

According to Nişanyan (an amateur but well-acquainted Turkish etymologist) there are about 11,700 words commonly used in Turkish. By "_commonly used_" he refers to words that  a cultured person knows and uses when addressing the public without needing to explain the definitons on a non-technical matter.

1200 words from Old Turkic
300 words formed in Anatolia with Turkic stems
3300 words from Arabic
3200 words from  French and Latin
1000 words from Persian
500 words from English
400 words from Italian
300 words from Greek
250 words from others
600 words officially formed after the Language Reform
250 words by onomatopoeia
250 words of unknown origin


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## Ajura

Jamaican Patois is also one of them...


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## mataripis

I believe English and other European languages particularly the Latino versions have most diverse compositions and open to accept more loan words to comply with the changing lifestyles and events.It is due to the fact that these languages were developed from older forms by merging  the words from Latin,El-linika,Sanskrit and Aramaic tongues.While there are continueos development of words out of the root words from the loan words.No wonder their influence penetrate almost all cultures.The high intellectual standards of Caucasian race made their words/languages compatible with the growth/sprout of their technologies, that are made acceptable too to other cultural groups of people.They are modernized types.The other languages are more conservative type, because they are more inclined in Spirituality and not comprehensible to those who are modernized.


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## erased

erased said:


> Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes intulit agresti Latio (Horace, Epist.. Il, 1, 156) The Greece, conquered by the Romans, conquered (culturally) the ferocious winner,and brought the arts in raw Lazio.


  Usually the Greek influence on Latin is underestimated, i don t know why. Many Latin words come,indeed, from Greek (obviously,this happens also in the Latin derived languages).But i dont know the right %,but i suppose it could be a high %. You wait the answer of some greek poster.You add the Albanian to list.


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## terredepomme

The Romany language has loanwords from Persian, Armenian, Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, Slavic languages, Hindi, and Prakrit.


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