Coming up on Word Matters, a listener question that gets at the core of the language.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amon Shea,
Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
English is widely reputed to be a Germanic language,
and yet we're constantly talking about the vast swaths of its vocabulary that have Latin not German at their roots.
So, is English truly a Germanic language after all?
Peter starts us off.
We got a note from Robert with a question.
I was wondering,
since the English language has been so influenced by Latin and Greek and to a lesser degree French,
can it really be called a Germanic language?
or has it over the centuries developed into a sort of quasi-Germanic language?
And that's a great question.
And it opens up such a discussion of sort of what a language is, what constitutes a language.
It seems like in Robert's framing, if we're just talking about vocabulary...
then he's got a good argument that there are so many terms that have come from other languages into English,
and in particular, Latin-based language borrowings.
But the reason English is called a Germanic language is largely syntactical.
I think it's largely grammatical and not based on vocabulary,