From: "Adam Flinton" 

It's coz the French speaking Norsemen who won in 1066 thought Germanic
languages were "common" as they'd just swappped to froggie.

E.g. wench is simply the saxon word for woman but it has "rough"
connotations. However.....usually the shorter the word the older the word
& most of the short words are germanic/norse.

adam



"Mike '/m'"  wrote in message
news:0o4c2v8ks9t14vv6go5bf6c9mi8g3l320u{at}4ax.com...
> On Wed, 15 Jan 2003 19:28:20 -0600, David N. Barnett
>  wrote:
>
> >On Wed, 15 Jan 2003 23:15:34 +0000, adam flinton
> > wrote in message
:
> >
> >| > Again, what's the difference 
> >| > (well actually they're quite different, only some words in Finnish
are taken
> >| > from Swedish)
> >| >
> >| >
> >|
> >|
> >| & surprizingly few from the slavic languages........(i.e. ruski ezik)
> >
> >Similarly, English is a Germanic language, but much of our vocabulary
> >comes from French and other Latin-derived languages.
>
>
> One interesting aspect of this is in the area of food.
>
> When the farm animals are out in the fields, the English names
> typically are Germaniic.  When those animals are on the table, the
> English names are typically French.
>
>  /m

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