A Corpus-Based Quantitative Survey of the Etymological Composition of Contemporary British English: The Case of Latin, Greek and French

Abstract

We report in this paper a corpus-based survey of the borrowed words from Latin, Greek and French and their use in contemporary English. The objective is to chart their occurrence and distribution across a set of different text categories and subject domains on the basis of the British National Corpus. The survey empirically shows that different text types demonstrate different distribution of borrowed words, which distinguish speech from writing and, within writing, academic prose from non-academic prose. The survey also shows that different subject domains also have their own preferences for borrowed words. While Greek words were generally found to be of limited use, the survey demonstrates in quantitative terms that Latin and French words tend to have a polarized distribution according to different genres and domains.