Syllabic division of words

[Mark Swindell]

That's because most common words in English are native English words  
with Germanic roots.  Short, to the point, guts v. intestines.  Most  
specialized vocabulary comes from Greek or Latin roots (French, etc.)

I think I recall reading somewhere that only 15% of English words are  
of English origen, but 90% of spoken English consists of that original  
15%.  Robert Claiborne  wrote a wonderful book called Our Marvelous  
Native Tongue.  An excellent read.  That statistic might come from  
there (I can't vouch whether the percentages are exact, but you get  
the point).

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Marvelous-Native-Tongue-Language/dp/0812910389/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1250697845&sr=8-1

Mark


On Aug 18, 2009, at 9:41 PM, capellan wrote:

>
>
>
> Have you noticed that common words are
> always shorter than specialised vocabulary?