{"id":53,"date":"2006-05-06T19:38:28","date_gmt":"2006-05-06T18:38:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2006\/05\/06\/do-you-know-what-you-are-saying\/"},"modified":"2006-05-06T19:38:28","modified_gmt":"2006-05-06T18:38:28","slug":"do-you-know-what-you-are-saying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=53","title":{"rendered":"Do You Know What You Are Saying?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There was an interesting programme on BBC Radio 4 yesterday &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/radio4\/history\/routes_doyouknowwhat.shtml\"><em>Do You Know What You Are Saying?<\/em><\/a> &#8211; in which Melvyn Bragg used a new computer program to analyse the amount of words of Anglo-Saxon \/ Old English origin in modern English.<\/p>\n<p>He looked at the language used by a radio DJ (Terry Wogan), a lawyer, an author (Dylan Thomas) and a rapper. Not surprisingly, the one with the lowest proportion of Anglo-Saxon words was the lawyer (about 60%), while the rapper used the highest proportion (90%). He also analyized his own language and found he uses around 80% of his words are of Anglo-Saxon origin.<\/p>\n<p>For all the language he examined, the proportion of Anglo-Saxon words was much higher than expected. It seems that English remains very much a Germanic language, eventhough it contains numerous loanwords, particularly from Norman, French, Latin and Greek.<\/p>\n<p>Some people, notably those in the legal and medical professions, tend to use many words and phrases of Latin and Greek origin, partly to obscure the meaning of what they&#8217;re saying. Moreover, descriptions of medical conditions sound much more impressive in Latinate language than in plain English. If you&#8217;re told you suffer from nystagmus, for example, you might think that it sounds like an interesting disease, though what it actually means is &#8220;wonky eyes&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There was an interesting programme on BBC Radio 4 yesterday &#8211; Do You Know What You Are Saying? &#8211; in which Melvyn Bragg used a new computer program to analyse the amount of words of Anglo-Saxon \/ Old English origin in modern English. He looked at the language used by a radio DJ (Terry Wogan), [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}