(Apologies to Roger who'll get this twice. 'Twas meant for the list.)

On 2012-02-19 19:23, Roger Mills wrote:
> I just went thru the test again, and still got 41,300.
>
> Words I did not know or recognize: chivvy, fuddle, cenacle (religious term?), cantle, clerisy, hynopompic, sparge, opsimath (sp?, can't read my own handwriting....:-(( )
>
> Words I recognized by wasn't sure of meaning (and did not check): sedulous, captious, funambulist
>
> The list doesn't include any/much flora or fauna especially exotica*, terms from geography, geology, anthropology, medicine, sexuality etc. etc. and of course no linguistic jargon (phoneme, morpheme etc.), all of which clutter my mind.
> ---------
>
> *of course, those tend to be from foreign langs.
>

So are all[*] the words you listed above; they are Latin/Greek
w/o French intermediacy.  Are English speakers really not
sensitive to the fundamental foreignness of a large part of
their vocabulary? (The last sentence intentionally didn't
contain more than one native English content word, BTW! ;-)
I'm not saying this as criticism, but because I'm genuinely
perplexed. I have a hard time believing that adult speakers
of Germanic languages can't tell Classical/Romance vocab
items apart from Germanic vocab components by their form and
morphology, let alone feel that there are two vocabulary
components, yet I have encountered this too often for this
to be an exception.  This is all the more strange as people
normally *don't* coin new words by tacking Romance affixes on
Romance roots, so that one would believe they have some feel
for what goes together and what doesn't.

/bpj

[*]: Except perhaps _fuddle_...