I was finally able to get a good breakdown of English language roots with the exact percentages. In a previous post I had only guessed at the figures.
According to a 1973 analysis of the shorter (but still 80,000 words) Oxford Dictionary:
28% of English words came from Latin
28% came from French (which is largely Latin)
25% came from elsewhere in the Germanic family
5% came from Greek.
Long story short, more than half of our words (56%) come from the Romance branch and one quarter of our words are more or less from German. Romance and German account for 81% of English words. If we add in the 5% Greek, fully 86% of English words (or almost all of them) come from Romance, German and Greek. Of course the Romance words are all borrowings and only the German words are truly genetically English.
