Editing German language (section)

==Vocabulary==
Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, although there are significant minorities of words derived from [[Latin language|Latin]] and [[Greek language|Greek]], and a smaller amount from French<ref>some of which might be reborrowings from Germanic [[Frankish language|Frankish]]</ref> and most recently English.<ref>a phenomenon known in German as [[Denglisch]] or in English as [[Germish]] or Denglisch</ref> At the same time, the effectiveness of the German language in forming equivalents for foreign words from its inherited Germanic stem repertory is great. Thus, [[Notker Labeo]] was able to translate Aristotelian treatises in pure (Old High) German in the decades after the year 1000. Overall, German has fewer Romance-language loanwords than English or even Dutch. {{Citation needed|date=October 2009}}

The coining of new, autochthonous words gave German a vocabulary of an estimated 40,000 words as early as the ninth century.{{Citation needed|date=June 2009}} In comparison, Latin, with a written tradition of nearly 2,500 years in an empire which ruled the Mediterranean, has grown to no more than 45,000 words today.{{Citation needed|date=June 2009}}

Even today, many low-key non-academic movements try to promote the ''[[Ersatz]]'' (substitution) of virtually all foreign words with  ancient, dialectal, or [[neologism|neologous]] German alternatives.<ref>{{cite web|author=Verein Deutsche Sprache e.V. |url=http://vds-ev.de/anglizismenindex |title=Verein Deutsche Sprache e.V. - Der Anglizismen-Index |publisher=Vds-ev.de |date= |accessdate=2010-03-15}}</ref> It is claimed that this would also help in spreading modern or scientific notions among the less educated, and thus democratise public life, too.

The modern German scientific vocabulary has nine million words and word groups (based on the analysis of 35 million sentences of a [[corpus (lexicography)|corpus]] in Leipzig, which as of July 2003 included 500 million words in total).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://wortschatz.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/html/inhalt_next.html |title=Ein Hinweis in eigener Sache |publisher=Wortschatz.informatik.uni-leipzig.de |date=2003-01-07 |accessdate=2010-03-15}}</ref>