with inadvertence ...

Somehow over last few years without making any conscious attempts I have been able to tell if any word has germanic roots or not. It is not a hard thing to do, if you are a linguist / etymologist; but for what I am, an "enthusiast" at most, it should be considered no less than an achievement since its done so inadvertently. In retrospect I started working on my English vocabulary about 4 years back, when I felt my vocabulary was too limited and its only use had been to translate my thoughts from my native language - Hindi. I took a more sophisticated way towards improving my vocabulary, not because the crude way of memorizing the words painfully was too easy for me, but rather because contrarily it was impossible for me to remember word-meanings ever since my childhood days. Since memorizing dictionary meanings was neither feasible nor interesting for me, I took the rather long way. I just took the OED and traced the whole history of a new word. I could then understand that when someone makes vitriolic remarks, s/he is actually just reusing the medieval sense of throwing vitriol. Obviously vitriol is sparingly used in modern English, but the word 'vitriolic' is quite common and when used could be considered a sign of your command on English language. I rather naively, observed that almost all sophisticated words (esp those "power" words from law, politics and economics) in English had to have latin roots. Romans didn't just have better armies than Germanic tribes, I thought - they also had a more organized language. Latin grammar easily would have prevailed all over Europe. For English, however this was an uninformed speculated generilization. English was transformed more because of the French invasion (Norman conquest of England in 1066 by Duke William II and the subsequent replacement of the Anglo-Saxon rule). Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon languages then combined to become what was later to be known as Middle-English. A lot of English words thus show roots in French. I was excited to observe that all English words ending in -ive were directly (or rather shamelessly, I thought) borrowed from French words. Old French positif, affirmatif were brought into English (and modern French) as positive and affirmative respectively, for example. This was just one of the many observations that I made by myself.

All this was enough to make me feel deeply interested in the French language. While learning French I realized that the old French mostly used the corresponding Latin words almost unchanged. An improved French vocabulary eventually enriched my knowledge-bank of Latin roots too as a result. This wasn't over yet. My interactions with a few other enthusiasts on an online community whetted my appetite for Indo-European etymology. I was thrilled to observe that so many of Sanskrit words (Sanskrit: mother of most South Asian languages) shared roots with Latin words. With later studies in Latin grammar, I discovered that the grammatical similarities in Latin and Sanskrit were even more conspicuous. This was inexplicable for me. I thought that Tower-of-Babel could be the only possible answer to such striking and profound similarities. Then this crazy idea came to my mind - to see if there could a sanskrit way of speaking latin- and hence speaking English too. After researching a little bit, I realized that it isn't just possible. The way words are formed, they follow a certain path in history. There are metaphorical and allegorical remarks that go into formation and popularization of a word. I might choose a parallel in another language, but that doesn't necessarily reject or isolate the history of the word in the source language. That explains why I always felt uncomfortable with certain words in Hindi that were translated from English (some Biblical words especially) but didn't make any sense in the native language. They were just transplants of unknown origin and always failed to make the same impact as the original English word.