There's so much medieval and Norman French in English that I'm not sure "loanword" is the appropriate term: 40 percent of vocabulary isn't loan words, it's creolization.Vicki Rosenzweig
- I am not sure I would agree. I think English at its core has remained English. A vocabulary by itself does not a language make. English grammar fundamentally and directly derives from its Germanic heritage, and as far as vocabulary goes, in general the most common and basic words (pronouns, and most everyday words) come from Old English. The French loanwords were grafted onto a Germanic language; it wasn't like two languages were fused into some kind of hybrid compromise. soulpatch