Mercury- the element.? what family does it belong to? origin of the name? cost? discovered by? when? any interesting facts??? need info now for report!!! thanx!!!
Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. Itâs weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet.
One unique characteristic of English is that it was originally a Germanic language that acquired so many words from Latin, mostly via Old French and Norman French, that it eventually became essentially a Romance language. Two thirds of words in modern English are of Romance origin. It retained this sense in other Romance languages, and came to mean sex of a human being in English only in the 20th century. 2  impair: from French empirer and Latin impejorare meaning 'get worse' or 'deteriorate'.