[ecspike]

I've told folks half joking and half not that if they really want to level up their English, they should learn French. Once you know what to look for, you notice all the English words that came from French. It's something like 30% of our words.

[thaumasiotes]

> It's something like 30% of our words.

Not by any metric you'd care about. (And almost certainly not by any metric at all.)

Your comment contains 49 words. 4 come from Norse, 2 come from Latin (without passing through French), and 3 come from French. The remaining 40 come from Old English.

That's the count by token. By lemma, I counted 9 duplicate words, of which two are Norse and 7 are English. That brings French all the way up to 7.5%!

[scirpaceus]

It's true, though, and in fact 30% is a conservative estimate. The percentage of English words that come from French varies from 29% to 45% depending on whether you count derivatives of those words.

A very non-exhaustive overview of this is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...

[thaumasiotes]

What overview? That page repeats a bunch of claims on the basis of nothing, with a big banner at the top of the page warning you that none of the content is supported by any evidence.

The only citation on that page is a dead link to a Canadian university's "about our French program" page, which, while it does claim that 45% of all English words "come from French words" (again, on the basis of nothing), nevertheless manages to contradict the Wikipedia page that cites it by estimating the number at 50,000 rather than Wikipedia's reported 80,000.

[qingcharles]

That was a great link, thank you!

I managed to find this, which is something that interests me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gairaigo_and_wasei-eig...

(Japanese words taken mostly from English)

[fmajid]

Knowing French really helps with the higher register of English, as most of the “fancy” words have French roots.