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From: grass@uiucdcsb.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Esperanto and the origins of some in
Message-ID: <10500043@uiucdcsb.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 21-Jan-85 10:31:00 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcsb.10500043
Posted: Mon Jan 21 10:31:00 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 23-Jan-85 05:04:11 EST
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Nf-From: uiucdcsb!grass    Jan 21 09:31:00 1985

/* Written 10:21 am  Jan 15, 1985 by mgv@duke in uiucdcsb:net.nlang */
I was told in school that 60% of all English words have a
Latin origin.  Does anyone know what the percentage for
Russian is?

				Marco Valtorta
/* End of text from uiucdcsb:net.nlang */
 
I don't know what the percentage of Latin roots in Russian would be, but it
would be fairly small.  And I imagine most of those would be 19th and 20th
century loan words from French and English.  

Russian has a "dual" vocabulary, something like English, with what you
could call a "native Russian" vocabulary for everyday things contrasted
with a Church Slavic derived vocabulary for higher concepts and abstracts.
For example: native russian "golova" = head (a part of the body) vs.
"glava" = head (abstract.. of a company).  

Both versions ultimately trace back to Common Slavic, but the "native Russian"
words show typical Eastern Slavic phonological changes, where the Church Slavic
words reflect an earlier stage of the phonology (reflected today in such
South Slavic languages as Bulgarian).  The persistence of the C.S. forms have
probably got to do with the fact that most writing in Russia before, say, 1700
was theological in nature and done in Russian Church Slavonic.  Native
forms were not all that common in writing until later. 

Greek has had a greater influence on Russian, via Orthodoxy, than Latin.
A lot of Greek words were translated morpheme by morpheme into Slavic roots
and imported into Russian.  A lot of that occured in preparing Russian
texts of Greek Orthodox theological works.  
	- Judy Grass,  University of Illinois - Urbana
	  {ihnp4,pur-ee,convex}!uiucdcs!grass   grass%uiuc@csnet-relay.arpa