The English Language Sandwich

The Lord of the Rings: words from Old English, French, Latin

(Bilbo) was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years,
ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had
brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly
believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels
stuffed with treasure.

Roman type = Old English origin; bold = French origin; italic = Latin origin

As a result of these three key influences, English has hundreds of 'triplets': groups of three words, one from each ancestral strand, which describe related actions and concepts, but with rather different nuances. Three words in the Lord of the Rings passage illustrate this perfectly:

Though very visible, these three strands do not explain where all the words of English came from. First, there is a Scandinavian ingredient, from the Vikings.

Slaughterous wolves:

Though the period of Viking incursions into Britain lasted only a little over two centuries, the mark of the feared Norsemen - 'slaughterous wolves' as they were called in a poem of the time - is still very evident today. Some of the words they brought were incorporated into late Old English: call, and fellow, for example; others, such as awkward and beaker, into Middle English. Some, such as freckle and gormless, bubbled under in dialects, sometimes for centuries, before entering mainstream English. There are estimated to be up to 900 words of Viking origin, and many of them are ones we would sorely miss.

Common Viking words in English

The figures below show the relative proportions of words from the strands that we have been looking at, as reflected by the words in a desk-size Oxford dictionary.
Old French 21%
Norse 2%
Latin 46%
Greek 18%
Old English 13%

The final element in the lexical make-up of English consists of the thousands of 'loanwords' imported from over 350 languages.