"if" wrote:

>> English is the heir of all languages.

Ernest Schaal replied:

> The same can be said about most languages, which adopt words from other
> languages. Just look at all those words in Japanese that are in katakana.

Oh, it's not confined to katakana words. "Arigatou", for example, 
apparently comes from the Portuguese "obrigado", even though it is 
written in hiragana.

But the main bulk of loan words is found in the on-yomi of kanji (the 
"san" reading of 山 [yama], etc.; it is calculated that 60% of Japanese 
vocabulary is of Chinese origin, which is a higher proportion than the 
number of words of Latin origin in English.

And there are loan words whose history is lost in the midst of time. The 
name of Mount Fuji apparently derives from an Ainu word meaning 
"fire-mountain", and there are doubtless many others from many other 
sources during the period before the written word arrived in Japan.

Other languages are similarly hodgepodges of different tongues at 
different periods. A few - usually as a result of of extreme isolation - 
appear to be less of a jumble, but at some stage in their history they 
will have rubbed shoulders with other languages; it's just that it 
hasn't been recorded and is lost in the mists of time.

Even Sanskrit, or Ur-Indoeuropean, were pieced together from older 
languages that we no longer know anything of.

Still, what "if" says is particularly true of English, with its 
bastardised origins and eclectic borrowings.

John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com