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0 pointsstymaar1d ago0 comments

Interesting choice of words I'd say: as a French person this test is pretty much a test about “how close is the English word to the original French meaning” as the test was almost devoid of obscure words of Germanic origin.

At least I learned a bunch of «faux-amis» in the process.

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RugnirViking1d ago· 2 in thread

In general the observation in English is that most words that are close to what medival lower classes did everyday (tree, cow, house, stool): (træ, ko, hus, stol) are of danish/norse origin, and those from French are related to what the upper class did (arbory, beef, mansion, chair): (arbor, bœuf, maison, chaise)

So not surprising perhaps that many of the more obscure words end up being french.

stymaarOP1d ago

> So not surprising perhaps that many of the more obscure words end up being french.

Of course, for a native speaker at least, but for people with English as a second language there are many lower-class words that we never encountered before, because they simply don't occur in books or in online discussions. I got 88 correct out of 100 in this list but I'm almost certain I'd have faired much worse had the list been about niche house or agricultural items.

What counts as "obscure" is highly context dependent.

gpvos1d ago

Some of the most obscure English words are essentially Dutch though. There was a test online at some point (see my other comment) that was quite hard for me but got easier at the very highest levels.

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