An image of a text-based social media post by Anton Jäger.  The text reads "very cool how every piece of digital technology is now purposely designed to breed illiteracy".  It's followed by an Adobe pop up message saying "this appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary."
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[+] 6 points 6 months ago* (3 children)
  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    I believe the actual number is around 25-30%. Blame the Norman invasion.

    But French is like 80% Latin roots so you can blame the Romans before that.

    Also yeah the crazy number of synonyms is a peculiarity of English because it also has strong influence from Old Germanic, Latin (more directly), Greek, even a bit of Sanskrit.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    To add to your point, English is an amalgamator of words from many other languages. When another language has a word without a perfect English equivalent, English tends to adopt it, allowing words like shampoo and karaoke to become part of our language too. It’s a good part of the reason that English has more words than most other European languages

    English breaks most of its own rules to begin with, and we seem to delight in finding ways to toy with the language even more.

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