That's because most common words in English are native English words
with Germanic roots. Short, to the point, guts v. intestines. Most
specialized vocabulary comes from Greek or Latin roots (French, etc.)
I think I recall reading somewhere that only 15% of English words are
of English origen, but 90% of spoken English consists of that original
15%. Robert Claiborne wrote a wonderful book called Our Marvelous
Native Tongue. An excellent read. That statistic might come from
there (I can't vouch whether the percentages are exact, but you get
the point).
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Marvelous-Native-Tongue-Language/dp/0812910389/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1250697845&sr=8-1
Mark
On Aug 18, 2009, at 9:41 PM, capellan wrote:
Have you noticed that common words are
always shorter than specialised vocabulary?
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