Old English
The Germanic core — home, hearth, body, weather.
Spot it: kn-, gh, th, wh, -ful, -ward, short concrete words
The roots of English — a field guide
English is a mongrel language, built in layers over fifteen centuries: a Germanic core, a Norse overlay, a French ruling class, and endless borrowings from Latin, Greek, and beyond. Learn to see the layers and you can read a word's history straight off its spelling. This is the same guide the games lean on — here it is in one place.
The six strata of English
Almost every English word belongs to one of six families. Each has a home region, a characteristic feel, and telltale spellings.
Old Norse
What the Vikings left behind — blunt, everyday words.
Spot it: sk-, eggy/uggy sounds, law & ship words, even 'they'
Latin
Empire, church, and scholarship — twice-borrowed, often.
Spot it: -tion, -ity, -ous, aqua-, -pede, polished abstract words
Old French
The Norman conquest, 1066 — law, cuisine, refinement.
Spot it: ch- said as 'sh', -et, -age, beauty & banquet words
Greek
The language of science and ideas, coined and re-coined.
Spot it: ph, rh, y inside a word, -logy, -graph, tele-, micro-
Arabic
Borrowed along the trade routes — math, goods, comfort.
Spot it: al- at the front, market goods, star & number words
Grimm's law — why cousins don't look alike
Latin and the Germanic languages both descend from Proto-Indo-European, but Germanic drifted away by a regular set of sound shifts, catalogued by Jacob Grimm. Where Latin (and the French and Latin words English later borrowed) kept an old consonant, English's inherited core shifted it. Once you know the pattern, the cousins line up:
| Shift | Same word, two routes |
|---|---|
| p → f | Latin pēs, English foot |
| t → th | Latin trēs, English three |
| k → h | Latin cor, English heart |
| d → t | Latin dēns, English tooth |
| gʷ → kw | Latin vīvus, English quick |
This is why father and paternal, or heart and cardiac, are the same ancient word arriving by two different roads. Branch is built entirely on these split lineages.
How to coin a word
Greek and Latin combining-forms are the LEGO of English: tele- (far), necro- (death), -logy (study of), -phile (lover), -mancy (divination). Snap two together and you have a word — most of which nobody has ever coined.
There is one rule of assembly, the classical-compound rule: keep the connecting -o- before a consonant (necro + phobia → necrophobia), but drop it before a vowel (necro + archy → necrarchy, never necroarchy). Build words this way in Mint.