About 60% of English vocabulary comes from Latin and French. The other 40% is mostly Germanic. This isn't a coincidence. It's the linguistic fingerprint of one of history's most consequential invasions.

In 1066, William the Conqueror's Norman forces crossed the English Channel and defeated King Harold at Hastings. For the next three centuries, England was ruled by a French-speaking aristocracy. The peasants still spoke Old English — a Germanic tongue closely related to modern Dutch. But anyone wanting power, money, or social standing had to learn Norman French.

This split created one of the strangest features of English: we have two or three words for almost everything, with different social registers. You eat cow, pig, and sheep — Germanic words used by the peasants who raised the animals. But at the table, you serve beef, pork, and mutton — French words used by the nobles who ate them. You ask someone a question (French) or you wonder (Germanic). You drink (Germanic) at a casual meal, but imbibe (Latin) at a fancy one. Freedom is Germanic. Liberty is French.

This dual vocabulary makes English unusually rich but also chaotic. Most languages have one word for most concepts. English often has three, each with slightly different connotations: rise, mount, ascend. Help, aid, assist. Fear, terror, trepidation.

The Germanic words generally feel more concrete, earthy, emotional. The Latinate words feel abstract, formal, intellectual. This isn't arbitrary — it's a residue of which class of people used which words. Writing that uses Germanic words feels direct. Writing heavy on Latinate words feels distant and bureaucratic. Orwell famously argued that clear political writing requires returning to the Germanic register and stripping out the Latinate fog.

English grammar, meanwhile, is overwhelmingly Germanic. The basic sentence structure, the pronouns, the common verbs (be, have, do, go, come, see, eat, sleep) are all Germanic. The closest living relative to English is actually Frisian, a language spoken by about 500,000 people in the Netherlands.

This hybrid nature is one reason English spread so successfully. When a Spanish or French speaker encounters English, roughly half the vocabulary looks familiar. It's not a better language — but it's a remarkably sticky one.