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I've heard people say that the reason English is such a great language is that it's enriched itself by stealing so promiscuously from other languages. The image I get of English is that she's like the kind of old and very distinguished madam that you'd see running a storied whorehouse in New Orleans. We have "beef" from French and "cow" for the living animal, we have "automobile" formed from the miscegenation of Greek and Latin. We have drug czars and pajamas and canyons and chow mein.

Is this story of English exceptionalism really true, or is it an urban folktale like the number of Eskimo words for snow? It does seem that certain languages such as French and Katharevousa Greek have been much more concerned with maintaining their purity. Are there other languages that could contend with English for the title of Most Thieving Language?

I originally asked this on english.SE, but folks there suggested it would be more appropriate here.

Sir Cornflakes
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    It doesn't seem objectively true. Ottoman Turkish, Romanian, every pidgin and creole (among which I might place English), Yiddish, Romani, Sabir... Perhaps among modern Western European formal languages it's true. I think the core issue is that it's sort of a mixed Germanic and Romance language - at some point the Romance portion is more than borrowing, it's simply inheritance. The other factor is that English is spoken in many countries, so it "has" words for some rare fruit in India but that hardly implies that speakers in Newfoundland know those words. – Adam Bittlingmayer Mar 07 '16 at 19:53
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    And the English software vocabulary is purer than that of any other language. – Adam Bittlingmayer Mar 07 '16 at 19:53
  • @A.M.Bittlingmayer: every pidgin and creole (among which I might place English) Interesting...I'm not a professional linguist, but WP's definition of a pidgin requires that it be a grammatically simplified language, and its definition of a creole is that it developed from a pidgin. Are you saying that English is, or was at some time, grammatically simplified? Would that be simplified compared to earlier Germanic languages? Compared to proto-Indo-European? Compared to English before the Norman conquest? –  Mar 07 '16 at 21:22
  • http://www.danshort.com/ie/timeline.htm – Count Iblis Mar 08 '16 at 00:17
  • You mean like Spanish and Arabic? Or maybe Japanese and anything written in katakana ("it is used for transcription of foreign language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words")? –  Mar 08 '16 at 01:32
  • @BenCrowell What is the past tense of must or the future tense of can? Even pronouns like thou and ye were lost. There are significant grammatical breaks with Norse and old Anglo-Saxon as one would expect in the circumstances - centuries of war on Celtic islands often under a Roman or Norman elite. But I don't see it as black and white, I would argue more for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_language. (That article by the way has a good list of fundamentally promiscuously borrowing languages, to the OP's question.) – Adam Bittlingmayer Mar 08 '16 at 06:46
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    @BenCrowell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis (was news to me) – Adam Bittlingmayer Mar 08 '16 at 17:51
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    Possible duplicate of Examples of Borrowing Languages – Sir Cornflakes Dec 30 '17 at 21:05
  • @BenCrowell - English grammar is simplified. Grammar of most other Germanic languages are a lot more complicated. – Pere Apr 24 '20 at 10:02

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Technically speaking, English (or any language) does not steal from other languages. Although we acquired "beef" from French, unlike actual theft, we did not deprive French of that word, and even today speakers of French use the word "boeuf". Nor do we "borrow", which implies an intent to repay, although there has been some payback in the form of originally-English words now employed in French ("OK", "weekend", "sandwich" and so on). We don't know who is responsible for the aforementioned self-loathing characterization of the history of English, but it wasn't a linguist.

This behavior is found in very many languages of the world, and English is not special in the percentage of its words that are nor strictly descended through the West Germanic line of Indo-European (suitable restated to identify the borrowed vocabulary of French, Norwegian, Persian and so on). There can be special impediments to borrowing, such as Korean's resistance to borrowing verbs. It is possible, though, that English may top the charts in terms of the number of different languages borrowed from.

user6726
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    Technically speaking, English does indeed borrow from other languages, because that is the technical word used in linguistics. What other meanings the word "borrow" may have are irrelevant here. – Colin Fine Mar 07 '16 at 18:27
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    User has, however, made a legitimate point. The technical term "borrow" is basically absurd if seen from the etymological meaning of this word. Linguists, more than anyone else, ought to respect etymology. – fdb Mar 07 '16 at 20:21
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    @fdb Quite the opposite, linguistics has shown that etymology is no guide to present meaning. – Gaston Ümlaut Mar 07 '16 at 21:02
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There are other languages with heavy borrowing. In Europe, Romanian comes to my mind (basic vocabulary and grammar inherited from Latin with lots of mostly Slavonic vocabulary borrowed (language purists replaced some of those borrowings with borrowings from Italian and French later on).

Another example might be Suaheli: A Bantu language in grammar with a heavy load of borrowings (mostly from Arabic).

However, I don't have quantitative data on either language.

Sir Cornflakes
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    I would add that the volume of borrowing from English into Swahili probably now equals that from Arabic. – user6726 Mar 07 '16 at 18:45