English Is a Germanic-Romance Language

linguistic hot takes by Aaron Freed

  1. The Norman Conquest, or How English Became English
  2. Greco-Roman Influence on English
  3. Greek is not all Greek to you (you know more than you think)
  4. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
  5. “And Adam knew Eve his wife…”
  6. An Eccentrically Exhaustive Etymological Encapsulation
  7. A Closing Note
  8. Endnotes

The Norman Conquest, or How English Became English

This is the opening of Beowulf, the most famous work in what we now call Anglo-Saxon or Old English.
Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in gēar-dagum
þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon,
hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þrēatum,
monegum mǣgþum meodo-setla oftēah. 5
Egsode eorl, syððan ǣrest wearð
fēa-sceaft funden; hē þæs frōfre gebād,
wēox under wolcnum, weorð-myndum þāh,
oð þæt him ǣghwylc þāra ymb-sittendra
ofer hron-rāde hȳran scolde, 10
gomban gyldan; þæt wæs gōd cyning.
Ðǣm eafera wæs æfter cennedgeong in geardum,
þone God sende folce tō frōfre;
fyren-ðearfe ongeat, þæt hīe ǣr drugon
aldor-[lē]ase lange hwīle. Him þæs Līf-frēa, 15
wuldres Wealdend, worold-āre forgeaf;
Bēowulf wæs brēme (blǣd wīde sprang),
Scyldes eafera Scede-landum in.

A few words of this are recognizable as what we now call English (“under”, “wæs”, “æfter”, “in”, “God”, “sende”, “sprang”). However, in every meaningful sense, this is a foreign language. It might as well be Old Norse; in fact, the two languages have much greater similarities than Old English does to Modern English.

I will not attempt to translate this; my complete knowledge of Anglo-Saxon extends to knowing that “Wyrd bið ful aræd” can be translated in several ways, including “fate is wholly inexorable”, “fate is law”… and “the way of the world is ever an open book”. (See this fascinating analysis from Rutgers professor Ophelia Eryn Hostetter.)

By contrast, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the most famous literary work in Middle English, opens:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth 5
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open yë 10
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende 15
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

This is English. It’s English with a funny accent, a few words that have since shifted substantially in meaning, and a few others that are now somewhat old-fashioned, but anyone with sufficient reading skill in English can likely parse most of Chaucer’s meaning⁽¹⁾ by simply reading him out loud.

What happened? Well, Beowulf was first conceived sometime between 700 and 1000 CE, and first written down sometime from 975 to 1025 CE. Geoffrey Chaucer began The Canterbury Tales in 1387 and continued writing it until his death at 1400 (unfortunately, he left it in an incomplete state). Linguistically, the most important event to English’s linguistic development occurred in 1066: William the Conqueror earned the title by which history now knows him. In other words, after the Norman Conquest, English started to turn French.

One could even argue what we now know as “English” is a language that diverged from its parent, and that at some point during this timeframe, the name “English” was applied to a completely new language.

Whatever the cause, I want to emphasize this point: English changed vastly more between 1066 CE and 1400 CE than it has changed between 1400 CE and the present. The Canterbury Tales’ language is an order of magnitude more different from Beowulf’s than it is from that of, say, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005). This leads to my titular thesis (some might say hot take) on the English language.

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Greco-Roman Influence on English

English is usually classified as a Germanic language. Broadly, this is true in that most of our short words are Germanic. The more syllables an English word contains, however, the higher the odds that it comes to us from either Latin or Greek (if not both). Let’s examine some of the words I’ve already written, starting with word. (All etymologies are from Wiktionary, one of the Internet’s most underrated resources for learning languages.)

From Dutch worden, from Middle Dutch werden, from Old Dutch werthan, from Proto-Germanic *werþaną.
(The asterisk before *werþaną is a linguistic convention signifying a modern linguistic reconstruction of which no attested examples survive. I’ll omit some of these for brevity, as this is already quite a long piece.)

So chalk up one for Germanic. Let’s look at here, the first word I used in this text.

From Middle English her, from Old English hēr (“at this place”), from Proto-West Germanic *hēr

Another short Germanic word. What about text?

From Middle English text, from Old French texte (“text”), from Medieval Latin textus (“the Scriptures, text, treatise”), from Latin textus (“style or texture of a work”), perfect passive participle of texō (“I weave”). Cognate to English texture.

So, even some of our short words are Latin. What about our longer ones? Let’s start with linguistic.

Borrowed from German linguistisch, equivalent to linguist + -ic.[1] Compare linguistics. Ultimately from Latin lingua (“tongue, language”). Attested in English since 1825.

So there’s a three-syllable Latin word. This etymology also covers language, in fact:

From Middle English langage, language, from Old French language, from Vulgar Latin *linguāticum, from Latin lingua (“tongue, speech, language”), from Old Latin dingua (“tongue”), from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s (“tongue, speech, language”). Doublet of langaj. Displaced native Old English ġeþēode.

And syllable?

From Middle English syllable, sillable, syllabylle, sylabul, from Anglo-Norman sillable, from Old French sillebe, from Latin syllaba, from Ancient Greek συλλαβή (sullabḗ), from συλλαμβάνω (sullambánō, “I gather together”), from συν- (sun-, “together”) + λαμβάνω (lambánō, “I take”).

In short, syllable is both Latin and Greek. And whence etymology?

From Middle English ethymologie, from Old French ethimologie, from Latin etymologia, from Ancient Greek ἐτυμολογία (etumología), from ἔτυμον (étumon, “true sense”) and -λογία (-logía, “study or logic of”), from λόγος (lógos, “word; explanation”).
Thesis is also a Greek word (θέσῐς, thésĭs), as are its derivatives hypothesis (ὑπόθεσις, hupóthesis), antithesis (ἀντίθεσις, antíthesis), synthesis (σύνθεσις, súnthesis), and prosthesis (πρόσθεσις, prósthesis).

And I could go on, but I believe I’ve made my point: Latin and Greek words are ubiquitous in English. (Ubiquitous is also Latin, incidentally: it is derived from ubiquē, literally wherever but used to mean everywhere.) Classifying English as Germanic is a severe oversimplification; it is actually a bastardized Germanic-Romance language (fitting, since romance can result in bastards if its participants are careless). I might even classify it as a Germanic-Romance-Hellenic language if that weren’t too much of a mouthful.

I haven’t been deliberately choosing Greek and Latin words to use as examples, but I acknowledge that my study of those languages may subconsciously influence me to use them.

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Greek is not all Greek to you (you know more than you think)

So enough about that pet peeve. Let’s address another one: the idiom “It’s all Greek to me.” Not even Greek is all Greek to you: as I’ve already shown, you already know some Greek; you probably just don’t know you know it. You may not know the Greek alphabet, but it’s really not very difficult to learn. It only has 24 letters, and you already know a lot of them. The letters that will most defy your intuition are likely:

However, as a beginning reader of Greek, you’ll already have a good intuition of what almost half the letters you encounter read represent: Thus, you’ll only need to learn:

That’s fourteen uppercase and fifteen lowercase letters⁽²⁾. You can knock that out tonight. I believe in you.

In conclusion, the idiom “It’s all Greek to me” should use a different language that’s had a lot less influence on English. I vote Mandarin⁽³⁾ – it’s the world’s most widely spoken language, and most English speakers know almost none of it, either written or spoken.

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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

But let’s ignore the alphabet. Let’s return to etymologies, starting with… ok, fine, let’s not ignore alphabet.

From Middle English alphabete, borrowed from Classical Latin alphabētum, from Ancient Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphábētos), from ἄλφα (álpha) and βῆτα (bêta), the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, Α (A) and Β (B), lowercase forms α and β. The Greek names derived from aleph, the name of the Phoenician letter 𐤀 (ʾ, “ox”) and beth, the name of the letter 𐤁 (b, “house”), so called because they were pictograms of those objects, having developed from the Egyptian hieroglyphs 𓃾 and 𓉐.
So, its use as a name for a writing system is basically a Greek invention. What about ignore?
From French ignorer, from Latin ignōrō (“to have no knowledge of, mistake, take no notice of, ignore”), from ignārus (“not knowing”), from in + gnārus (“knowing”), from gnōscō, nōscō; see know.
Apparently Latin. Surely agnostic is also Latin, then?
Coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1870. Either from Ancient Greek ἄγνωστος (ágnōstos, “ignorant, not knowing”), or from a- + Gnostic, deriving (either way) from Ancient Greek ἀ- (a-, “not”) + γιγνώσκω (gignṓskō, “I know”).
So no, it’s Greek. Which raises the question⁽⁴⁾: are gnōscō and γιγνώσκω cognates?
Cognates [of γιγνώσκω] include English know, Latin gnōscō, Albanian njoh, Old Armenian ճան- (čan-, “to know”), Sanskrit जानाति (jānāti, “to know”), and Old Persian 𐎧𐏁𐎴𐎿𐏃𐎡𐎹 (x-š-n-s-h-i-y /⁠xšnāsāhiy⁠/, “you shall know”).
So, yes and know. (Sorry, I’m constitutionally incapable of resisting a pun like that.)

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“And Adam knew Eve his wife…”

I only learned that know is cognate to gnōscō and γιγνώσκω while writing this essay. This answered a linguistic curiosity I’d had for years: why all three are euphemisms for have sex with or have ever had sex with. Let’s examine one of the most famous uses of this meaning, Genesis 4:1 (KJV, of course):
And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.
In the Vulgate, Saint Jerome’s Latin translation from 382—405 CE, this passage is:
Ādām vero cognōvit Havam uxōrem suam quae concēpit et peperit Cain dīcēns possēdī hominem per Dominum.

(Cognovit is a form of cognōscō, a derivative of gnōscō).

And here it is in the Septuagint, the Koine Greek translation (ca. 3rd century BCE):

ΑΔΑΜ δὲ ἔγνω Εὔαν τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ, καὶ συλλαβοῦσα ἔτεκε τὸν Κάϊν καὶ εἶπεν, ἐκτησάμην ἄνθρωπον διὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ.

Here, ἔγνω is the third-person singular aorist active indicative of γιγνώσκω. In short, knew isn’t a whim of King James’ translators; it’s an exact translation of the Vulgate and the Septuagint.

Now, let’s immanentize the Eschaton romanize the Septuagint.

ADAM dé égnō Eúān tḗn gŭnaîkă autoû, kaì sullaboûsa éteke tòn Káïn kaì eîpen, ektēsámēn ánthrōpon dià toû Theoû.

You already know many of those words. Autoû is a form of αὐτός (autós), meaning self. This is its masucline genitive singular form, which indicates possession; thus, τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ (tḗn gŭnaîkă autoû) means his own wife.

Αὐτός is the source of the English prefix auto-. Automobile, one of its most common uses, is a bastard hybrid of Greek and Latin, which is an abomination unto Nuggan. Possible fixes (that will never actually happen) include:

(Now get off my lawn.)

More seriously, by translating from Greek and Latin, we see that automobile literally means self-movable.

Next up, sullaboûsa looks a lot like syllable, doesn’t it? Well, as seen above, syllable is derived from συλλαμβάνω (sullambánō, “I gather together”). As it turns out, συλλαβοῦσα is the aorist participle of συλλαμβάνω. So chalk up another word you’ve encountered before. However, this is a different use that hasn’t transferred to English; the phrase συλλαμβάνω ἔτεκε (sullaboûsa éteke) actually means conceived and gave birth to.

Of course, ánthrōpon is the accusative singular of ἄνθρωπος (ắnthrōpos, “human being”). You probably already had a sense of what this means because it’s the source of numerous English words, including:

Lastly, Θεοῦ (Theoû) is clearly God. Where else would we have gotten theology, theocracy, atheism, pantheism, monotheism, and polytheism? (I leave parsing these words’ etymologies as an exercise for the reader: I believe you are now capable of doing so yourself, and the exercise will benefit anyone with sufficient interest in etymology to have read this far.)

One lesson I hope you’ve drawn from this is a major reason I love studying Latin and Greek: not only do they give us an idea of where so many of our words came from, but they enable us to know the meanings of words we’ve never seen before. If I’ve never seen the word bibliophilia, but I know βιβλίον (biblíon) means book and φῐλῐ́ᾱ (phĭlĭ́ā) means love, then I immediately know bibliophilia means love of books without having to look it up. I find that immensely satisfying.

An Eccentrically Exhaustive Etymological Encapsulation

Latin and Greek words used in the previous section whose etymologies I hadn’t already traced:

Passage, meanwhile, is borrowed directly from Old French, making it a Romance-language word by marriage rather than by blood. Lawn also comes from Old French lande, of either Germanic or Gaulish origin. Benefit is from Old French bienfait, which is modelled after Latin benefactum, making it arguably a Romance-language word twice over: once by marriage and the second time, honorarily, by blood.

If you’re counting, nearly all words with at least three syllables have been Latin or Greek. One-syllable words are mostly Germanic; two-syllable words go about fifty-fifty.

A Closing Note

In summation, a central irony of our language is that, in order to become at all recognizable as what we now know as English, our language had to become vastly more French. Make of that what you will. Personally, I just hear John Cleese with a funny accent saying, “Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.”

—Aaron Freed
—Tallahassee, FL
—2025-06-18 (last revised 2025-06-22)

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