According to pretty much any linguist you'd ask, about half of English words originate in the English language - e.g., they've been part of the language that has developed as a coherent (though changing) entity over the last ten centuries or so.
The other half come primarily from Romance languages, particularly Middle French and Latin itself. This causes historical linguists to joke that English could in fact be considered a Romance language, but they are just joking, as the syntactic history of English very clearly places it in the Germanic camp (in fact, English has borrowed relatively few words from German, but shares many cognates as English and German share a common ancestral tongue).
As far as the gif debate goes, the ever-relativistic linguist would point out:
The "correct" pronounciation of a word is however a given speech community pronounces it.
It is hardly unheard of for words to have more than one acceptable pronounciation.
Slashdot Mirror
According to pretty much any linguist you'd ask, about half of English words originate in the English language - e.g., they've been part of the language that has developed as a coherent (though changing) entity over the last ten centuries or so.
The other half come primarily from Romance languages, particularly Middle French and Latin itself. This causes historical linguists to joke that English could in fact be considered a Romance language, but they are just joking, as the syntactic history of English very clearly places it in the Germanic camp (in fact, English has borrowed relatively few words from German, but shares many cognates as English and German share a common ancestral tongue).
As far as the gif debate goes, the ever-relativistic linguist would point out: