English language

English originated in Anglo-Saxo

See also Language and etymology

Word parts & types

lexemes

• noun, verb, adjective and adverb "stems" (basic word by itself

morphemes

• sounds that are added to lexemes to create new words
  • including prefixes, suffixes and stem changes
    • pre-, -ly, -en, -s

English word origin

The approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century:
Old West Norse dialect
Old East Norse dialect
Old Gutnish dialect
Old English
Crimean Gothic
Other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility

Angles / Anglo-Saxon

• from the Angles, a Germanic peoples who migrated to the British Islands in the 400s-600s AD.
  • part of the Anglo-Saxon invasions
• English is one of the "Anglo-Frisian" languages

Language origins of Modern English

Origins of Modern English

Germanic	Old French	Latin	Greek	Other	Proper Names
26%	29%	29%	6%	6%	4%

The most common words in English

Top Ten Most Common Words in English

1) the	(article)	6) in	(preposition)
2) be	(verb)	7) that	(relative pronoun, dependent marker)
3) to	(particle, preposition)	8) have	(verb)
4) and	(conjunction)	9) I	(pronoun)
5) a	(article)	10) it	(pronoun)

English synonymous & part of speech word use

• the English language has a huge number of words that have multiple definitions
• other languages may be more explicit with distinct words that English will cover with a single word.
• for example:

English words & parts of speech distribution

• English contains about 600,000 words
  • as counted by the Oxford English Dictionary, there are 171,476 words in current use and 47,156 obsolete words
    • the Dictionary also counts 250,000 "distinct" words, excluding inflections (word ending changes)
  • when word definitions are counted, English has 1,402,895 words
    • i.e., the word "love" generally has five definitions in the dictionary
  • when counting "headwords" and "lemmas" (words produced from a headword), English has 578,707 words
    • "headword" = a word from which other words are derived, such as "break > broken > broke
  • see
    • How many words are there in the Engli... | Oxford Dictionaries (archive.org)
    • Corpus linguistics - Wikipedia
    • Which Language Has The Most Words? (babbel.com)
    • List of dictionaries by number of words - Wikipedia

parts of speech as percentage of all words

• in general, English consists of
  • Adjectives: 25%
  • Nouns: 50%
  • Verbs: 7%
    • see: How Many Words are in the Oxford English Dictionary? * alphaDictionary

parts of speech as percentage of word usage, conversational v. formal/academic:

English Language Percent Frequency of Use of Parts of Speech

	Adjectives	Adverbs	Conjunctions	Determiners	Nouns	Prepositions	Pronouns	Verbs
Conversational	2.5%	5%	4.5%	4.5%	15%	5.5%	16.5%	12.5%
Formal/ Academic	10%	3%	5%	10%	30%	15%	4%	10%
	Adjectives	Adverbs			Nouns			Verbs

• source: The 9 Parts of Speech in English | Ginseng English (from Biber, et. al., (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English.)

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