Interesting Facts

Loan words are words adopted from another language with little or no modification.    According to research by Philip Durkin, a senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, the most influential language on English is Latin. (According to Mr Durkin English contains around 13,000 words with Latin roots. The next most influential language is French with 6,000 words. (Borrowed - not stolen +Xeb eke  .) In fact, according to Mr Durkin's research, Hawaiian, Turkish, Zulu and Swahili have had more of an impact than Welsh and Cornish. Welsh ranked 30th. Cornish came in at 45th place. Even the word pasty came from France and not Cornwall.) Source: Borrowed Words by Philip Durkin

Tinnitus is a word direct from Latin which means “ringing”. (In English it describes a condition where the sufferer hears a constant buzzing, humming or ringing in the ears. This phantom sound goes on for 24 hours a day, seven days a week.)

American-based organisations accounted for nearly half of all applications for new net address endings, according to  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the organisation in charge of the expansion. (They received 884 requests for new suffixes from the US, out of a total of 1,930.  The breakdown of requests is as follows:- North America: 911 applications Europe: 675 applications Asia-Pacific: 303 applications Latin American and the Caribbean: 24 applications Africa: 17 applications 116 of the applications were for non-Latin alphabets.) Source

In English, years are designated with the letters AD (anno Domini, ‘year of the Lord’ in Latin); or, for years before that, BC (before Christ). (But the BBC has suggested that presenters should use “religiously neutral” terms to avoid causing non-Christians offence. The secular terms they want to use are BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). And it gets funnier, in Australia there are plans for schools to use BCE, CE and BP – “before present” – in preference to the traditional language.  Surely everything in the past would be BP.) More vocabulary on expressing the day / date here.

According to Jakob Uszkoreit, a senior engineer at Google, over 100,000 American students take the National Latin Exam every year. (With the launch of an additional Latin function into Google translate, it seems we can now read those ancient texts and even listen to Latin pronunciation. So who says it's a dead language?)