The Latin Roots of English [10:29]

YouTube ^ | June 6, 2025 | Garrett Ryan, Ph.D (as toldinstone)

[SunkenCiv]

0:00 Introduction 
0:36 Old English 
1:25 Norman conquest 
3:23 Medieval to Renaissance 
4:18 Shakespeare and company 
5:08 Modern borrowings 
5:48 Spelling 
6:33 Grammar 
7:03 Too much Latin? 
7:40 Gifts of a dual heritage 

The Latin Roots of English | 10:29
toldinstone | 583K subscribers | 28,937 views | June 6, 2025

[SunkenCiv]

--> YouTube-Generated Transcript <--
	·	Introduction
0:10	·	English is a Germanic language. It is a sister of Frisian and Low German,
0:16	·	a close relation of Dutch, and a variously distant cousin of Icelandic, Swedish,
0:22	·	and Yiddish. But thanks to fifteen centuries of invasion, invention,
0:28	·	and pedantry, almost two-thirds of the modern English vocabulary is derived from Latin.
	·	Old English
0:36	·	English was born when tribal groups from what are now Denmark and northern Germany – most famously,
0:42	·	the Angles and Saxons – overran the former Roman province of Britain.
0:48	·	The dialects spoken by the invaders, which would evolve into Old English,
0:53	·	were Germanic. From the beginning, however, Latin words were present.
1:00	·	Long before they came to Britain, the Angles and Saxons had dealt with Roman merchants,
1:05	·	from whom they learned such words as wine, from the Latin vinum; pound,
1:11	·	from pondus; cheap, from caupo; and monger, from mango. Other Latin words
1:18	·	entered Old English via interactions with the Romano-British and Christian missionaries.
	·	Norman conquest
1:25	·	The Latinization of English truly began, however, with the Norman Conquest of 1066. For more than
1:33	·	three hundred years, Norman French – based on vulgar Latin – was the language of government and
1:39	·	law in England. Latinate French words pertaining to these spheres flooded the English vocabulary:
1:47	·	sovereign and parliament, justice and jury, duke and prince.
	·	MyHeritage
1:53	·	[ad text redacted]
3:20	·	Returning to our topic. Later in the Middle Ages,
	·	Medieval to Renaissance
3:24	·	as the influence of French waned, more words were imported directly from Latin. Some,
3:31	·	like requiem and limbo, were religious. Others related to scholarship: allegory, library, desk,
3:41	·	scribe. Growing interest in Roman law inspired the coinage of client, conviction, and prosecutor.
3:51	·	The Renaissance witnessed an explosion of learned borrowings from Latin. In
3:56	·	keeping with Latin's status as the language of scholarship,
4:00	·	notable additions were made in the fields of medicine (rabies, forceps, lumbago),
4:08	·	physics (lens, pendulum, inertia), and mathematics (radius, series, formula).
	·	Shakespeare and company
4:18	·	The most remarkable Renaissance coinages, however, were literary. Many of the 1,700 or
4:25	·	so words invented by Shakespeare had Latin roots, including summit, submerged, excellent, castigate,
4:34	·	and obscene. Ben Jonson is responsible for defunct and strenuous. Sir Thomas Elyot produced animate,
4:44	·	exhaust, and modesty. Not all the Latinate terms concocted by Renaissance wordsmiths persisted:
4:53	·	lapidificial, obstupefact, and vadimonial were too beautiful for this world. But arbiter,
5:01	·	omen, equilibrium, stimulus, and thousands more are still with us.
	·	Modern borrowings
5:08	·	Borrowing from Latin continued at a more restrained rate until the nineteenth century,
5:13	·	when new sciences and new concepts elicited another generation of Latinate words: aquarium,
5:22	·	bonus, consensus, deficit, extra, et cetera. The twentieth century added thousands more (computer,
5:33	·	molecule, satellite) and countless compounds crafted with Latin prefixes and suffixes,
5:41	·	like re- and de- or -ize, -ment, -tion, and -able.
5:47	·	In addition to its vast influence on vocabulary, Latin is responsible for some quirks of English
	·	Spelling
5:54	·	spelling. Particularly in the 17th century, classically-educated authors and editors altered
6:00	·	numerous words to resemble Latin ancestors and analogues. Sometimes, a new Latinate spelling
6:09	·	changed a word's pronunciation: "aventure" became adventure, "perfit" became perfect,
6:17	·	and "verdit" became verdict. More often, the changes were silent, like the "p" added to
6:24	·	receipt, the "c" stuck in scissors, the "b" inserted into doubt, and the "s" in island.
	·	Grammar
6:33	·	Generations of English teachers instructed their students to carefully avoid splitting infinitives
6:40	·	and compose sentences that no prepositions dangled from. Both of these "rules" originated in,
6:48	·	or were at least argued by false analogy with, Latin. For that matter, the basic terminology
6:55	·	of English grammar – predicates, gerunds, and all that jazz – was taken directly from Latin.
7:02	·	Such pedantry has sometimes given Latin a bad name. So does the fact that Latinate vocabulary,
	·	Too much Latin?
7:10	·	liberally deployed, degenerates into sesquipedalian superfluity. In reaction,
7:17	·	some authors and scholars have championed Germanic words. The nineteenth-century
7:22	·	author William Barnes wrote an Outline of English Speech-Craft, in which he urged such alternatives
7:30	·	as "kin-elder" for ancestor, "forcarve" for amputate, and "waterlode" for aqueduct.
7:39	·	Most writers, however, appreciate the unparalleled expressiveness made possible by the complex
	·	Gifts of a dual heritage
7:46	·	heritage of English. Consider, for example, the slightly different connotations of these
7:52	·	pairs of Germanic and Latinate adjectives: earthly and terrestrial, hidden and latent,
8:01	·	timely and temporal. There are whole clusters of English words borrowed directly and indirectly
8:09	·	from the same Latin root: amiable and amicable; frail and fragile; poor, pauper, and impoverished.
8:20	·	English allows you to get or obtain, to hug or embrace, to win freedom or liberty.
8:29	·	A famous example of these expressive possibilities appears in the second act of Macbeth. Wracked with
8:36	·	guilt over his murder of Duncan, Macbeth fixates on the blood staining his hands:
8:42	·	Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
8:50	·	The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.
8:56	·	The polysyllabic Latinate phrase "multitudinous seas incarnadine"
9:02	·	means the same thing as the Germanic "making the green one red." But there is no redundancy here.
9:10	·	The English language, in short, would have been much simpler without Latin.
9:14	·	But it would also have been immeasurably poorer.
9:19	·	You too will be immeasurably poorer, if you don't check out my trip to Greece this October! There
9:25	·	are a few spots still available; to learn more, follow the link in the description. You'll also
9:31	·	find a link there for my Patreon, which is – I assure you – a veritable historical wonderland.
9:38	·	Check out my sadly neglected other channels,
9:42	·	Toldinstone Footnotes and Scenic Routes to the Past.
9:46	·	As a final reminder, you can get a 14-day free trial with MyHeritage
9:51	·	by following the link in the description.
9:54	·	Thanks for watching.

[SunkenCiv]

[tumblindice]

Magnus Cornholio sum! Num me minas?

[BenLurkin]

“Romans go home!”

[metmom]

English from the Roots Up.

https://www.amazon.com/English-Roots-Up-Vol-T/dp/0964321033

Great for homeschool curriculum.

[sauropod]

Bkmk

[Wuli]

The roots of English are in Celtic, Germanic (Angles and Saxons), Norse, Latin, Old English, Norman-French and not singularly one or the other.

I think “English” is a language built on more languages than any other.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark

[Languager]

The English language begins with the phrase, “up yours, Caesar!”

I like this little history here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crA3DRSeuGs

[Verginius Rufus]

I like the bit (at 6:33) about teachers telling their students "to carefully avoid splitting infinitives" (which is an example of a split infinitive).

English has so many loanwords from so many languages that we'd really be in trouble if they all had to be returned.

[JesusIsLord]

Took 2 years of Latin in H.S. I learned more English studying Latin than I did in English classes. The number of English word: roots, prefixes and suffixes that come from Latin is considerable.

E.g., the word "considerable" has Latin roots, stemming from the Latin verb "considerare," meaning "to look at closely, observe," and ultimately from "sidus," meaning "heavenly body, star, constellation."

[tumblindice]

On one hand, English is the most complex, descriptive, richest language in the world;
on the other (per C. Hitchens) its two biggest contributions to the world are the game of soccer (football, fussball) and the expression, “**** off.”

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

Uhuhuhuhu... uhuhuhuhuhuh uhuhuhuh

[SunkenCiv]

Heh... yeah... I’m glad he covered that one.

[Cronos]

I don’t think English is anywhere near the most complex language. That would be Hungarian (Magyar) or Finnish or Estonian.

Descriptive and richest? Nope. Latin, Sanskrit, Russian and Polish seem more descriptive to me and German with its merged words has tons more descriptiveness

[Verginius Rufus]

Maybe the most widely known English word worldwide is "O.K." But there are various theories as to its origin. Could be from an African language or an American Indian language.

I think the "Old Kinderhook" theory is wrong--the expression predates the use of "Old Kinderhook" (Martin van Buren's birthplace) and would not have lasted so long if inspired by an ephemeral political campaign.

[Verginius Rufus]

Finnish and Estonian (which belong to the same language family) have 15 cases. Hungarian (distantly related to those languages) has a lot but I don't know how many. All of them have a word for 100 borrowed from an Indo-European satem language. Evidently their remote ancestors didn't need to count to 100.

The Slavic languages can have as many as 7 or 8 cases. Latin has only 6 but the vocative is usually identical with the nominative. Ancient Greek had 5 but Modern Greek has reduced that to 3.

[Cronos]

Yup, polski has 7 cases:
Nominative (Mianownik)
Genitive (Dopełniacz)
Dative (Celownik)
Accusative (Biernik)
Instrumental (Narzędnik)
Locative (Miejscownik)
Vocative (Wołacz)

Latin has 6
Nominative
Genitive
Dative
Accusative
Ablative
Vocative (Locative is rare and context-specific, e.g., place names like Romae “at Rome.”)

Russian too has 6, having dropped evocative.

Sanskrit has 8 cases
Nominative
Accusative
Instrumental
Dative
Ablative
Genitive
Locative
Vocative

Marathi too has 8

[Tired of Taxes]

That was my first thought when I saw the title of this thread. ‘English from the Roots Up’ was great for studying vocabulary.