two summaries i apologize for being so negligent in posting these summaries to questions i asked 6 weeks ago . the responses were plentiful and very useful , and quick ! congratulations go to james vanden bosch ( vand @ calvin . edu ) and rob pensalfini ( rjpensal @ mit . edu ) who answered my questions on french loan words and language evolution before i had even received the posting from linguistlist . wow . the figure i had remembered was that some 10 , 000 words were borrowed from french into english . as most people said , it comes from baugh , albert c . ( 1951 ) , _ a history of the eng lang _ , 2nd edn . routledge & kegan paul , london , p . 215 . which was basically the only place i had n't looked . other interesting information : p . 327 " according to jespersen , nearly half ( 42 . 7 percent ) of the french borrowing in english to ca . 1900 belong to this [ 1250-1400 ] period . 36 . > from thomas pyles , the origins and development of the english language . ny : harcourt brace jovanovich 1971 , 2nd ed . pyles is quoting ( his footnote 36 ) : jesperson , growth and structure of the english language , 9th ed . oxford 1954 ( orig . pub . 1905 ) . other references : coleman , julie ( 1995 ) the chronology of french and latin loan words in english . _ transactions of the philological society _ 93 , 95-124 . there are further references there . there 's also a recent book , i think , by christiane dalton - puffer . steve seegmiller wrote : the total number of borrowings from french is certainly much higher that 10 , 000 - probably ten times that number or more , if you count the word in an unabridged dictionary ( rather than , say , the 20 , 000 most common words ) . i have heard figures ( perhaps from jespersen again , i ' m not sure ) to the effect that 80 % of all of the words in are borrowings , and 80 % of those are from french and latin . > from terry nadasdi i just saw your posting on linguist . i do n't have an exact reference , just a suggestion of where you might consider looking . i just had a look at my m . a . thesis which was on english loan words in canadian french . i have a quote there which suggests that w . d . whitney might be a place you could look . the quote is as follows : " rarely has any cultivated tongue , during a like period of history given up more of its ancient material than did the english during the few centuries which succeeded the norman invasion . . . " this quote by whitney was taken from a . elliot , 1889 in an article entitled " speech mixture in french canada " , american journal of philology , vol . x , 2 " speech mixture in french canada " , american journal of philology , vol . x , 2 no . 38 . p . 158-186 . i unfortunately no longer have the article with me , but your library should have it in order that you might find the original whitney source which give actual numbers of loan words from french to english . thanks again to ( in no particular order ) : roslyn blyn - ladrew ( jladrew @ chesco . com ) david denison ( mfcepdd @ fs1 . art . man . ac . uk ) steve seegmiller ( seegmillerm @ alpha . montclair . edu ) terry nadasdi ( tnadasdi @ gpu . srv . ualberta . ca ) burns cooper ( ffgbc @ aurora . alaska . edu ) w . h . edmondson ( w . h . edmondson @ cs . bham . ac . uk ) terry lynn irons ( t . irons @ morehead-st . edu ) ( and anyone else i missed ) this was my original second posting about the evolution of languages : > i once read that the natural evolution of a language is from > analytic to synthetic . i ' ve been unable to find that assertion > since , and am wondering if i made it up . replies to this open question were much more varied and i ' ll quote them all . > from rob pensalfini ( rjpensal @ mit . edu ) : i can't comment on who might have said it , but it has probably been said . i think english serves as a counterexample to some degree , where you had a highly inflecting language that lost a lot of its inflection ( verbal and nominal ) and now uses prepositions et al where case marking would have once done the work . i always imagined it as a circle , so that a fully isolating language might start to incorporate certain things and over the centuries become synthetic , polysynthetic even ( incorporating not only adpositions but pronominal arguments ) . eventually , some of the distinctions encoded in the inflection might be lost , some of the inflection might be lost altogether , and then the language ( we ' re talking centuries later again ) might use independent words ( perhaps adverbials or something ) to indicate particular grammatical relations , and lo and behold you ' ve got an isolating language again . the fact that change in either direction is possible is why there are two sides to debates on things like what the ancestor australian language ( s ) might have looked like . australia has both head marking ( polysynthetic ) languages and dependent ( case - ) marking languages , as well as languages that are a mixture of the two . some people think that the original language was dependent marking and that truncation and cliticisation of pronouns led to head-marking ( ken hale and i are among these people ) , while other people take the equally valid view that the ancestor was synthetic and that case marking developed in conjunction with the loss of head marking . hope this was of some use , rob carl mills ( carl . mills @ uc . edu ) wrote : i do n't know who made up this " theory , " but they are probably wrong . on this view , what happened to english between ca . 800 and ca . 1500 ? ? > from peter daniels ( pdaniels @ press-gopher . uchicago . edu ) : there are some remarks on this in the new book by anatole lyovin , * introduction to the languages of the world * ( oxford , 1997 ) ; i do n't remember whether he gives references . but the notion of progress between types is certainly found in max muller . i believe it was folks like boas who laid it to rest ; meanwhile the romance future formation cycle had been noticed , and if high - class languages like latin and french could oscillate between analytic and synthetic , then obviously it could n't be an evolutionary sequence ! > from john halloran ( seagoat @ pop . primenet . com ) : a trend from agglutinative to inflective was identified by bernard h . bichakjian in his article " evolutionary patterns in linguistics " which appeared in studies in language origins , vol 2 , ed . walburga von raffler - engel , jan wind , and abraham jonker ( amsterdam / philadelphia : john benjamins , 1991 ) , pp . 187-224 . he also identifies some other trends in linguistic evolution . geoffrey sampson ( geoffs @ cogs . susx . ac . uk ) wrote : my memory is that adalbert schleicher , who was the first writer to describe language evolution as a natural process akin ( or even identical ) to biological evolution , thought of the movement from analytic to synthetic as a decay which came about after the intellectual progress of mankind had attained a point at which it no longer needed to be supported by specific linguistic structures - - and that this was linked to themes in hegel 's philosophy , about which i am deeply vague . > from ian dale ( iandale @ ccs . carleton . ca ) : i take it you are referring in the first instance to wilhelm von humboldt . a few quick references . edward sapir ( language , 1921 , chapter 6 ) deals rather extensively with a rather more detailed typological comparison , without specific reference to humboldt . charles f . hockett ( 1958 , a course in modern linguistics , p181 ) dismisses such ideas out of hand , without giving a reference . r . h . robins ( 1964 , general linguistics : an introductory survey , pp 331 - 335 ) also discusses this sort of classification and does refer specifically to humboldt 's " ueber die verschiedenheit des menschlichen sprachbaues , berlin , 1836 ( reprinted darmstadt , 1949 . " but as to any sort of " natural evolution " , all ( and i imagine this " all " would include nearly all linguists ) agree that this is out of the question , especially if " evolution " has anything to do with " progress , " and especially since most languages display both synthetic and analytic features ( not to speak of such other terms as polysynthetic , agglutinative , isolating , and inflecting ) . > from asya pereltsvaig ( asya @ mail . netvision . net . il ) hi , i do n't know if it 's of any help to you or it will just confuse you , but i remember reading somewhere of just the opposite approach : that languages develop from synthetic to analytic . however , i can't address you to a reference right now . laurie bauer ( laurie . bauer @ vuw . ac . nz ) writes : if it is , the history of romance from latin needs some explanation - - or english from germanic , for that matter . yet if you consider french le livre , je l ' ai lu , moi in terms of phonology instead of traditional word breaks , we could argue that we have le _ livre je _ l ' ai _ lu moi in three words , the middle one of which is synthetic , derived from a more analytic j ' ai lu le livre . so we find both directions occurring naturally . whew ! thanks to everyone . this has shown me that there is no simple answer and that i should just as likely believe the opposite as what i thought i had read . m melanie misanchuk department of french italian and spanish university of calgary calgary , alberta , canada