I speak French along with English. Linguistically, English is a Germanic language but has a high percentage of French and Latin vocabulary. I'm just wondering how a lot of words of Germanic origin that existed in old English and always exist in modern other Germanic languages such as German, Dutch and Sweidsh, etc, had been lost and replaced by French and Latin vocabulary, for exemple: arbeiten (labour),
There's an ongoing thread about that one. As for the others, you seem to be underestimating the Germanic legacy of English:
This root still lives in the English words
"loft" and
"aloft".
This word comes from
Latin regere "to rule" (or some French derivation thereof), so it's no more Germanic than English "government".
This one has
a bunch of English cognates, among them "bind", "bend", "bond", and "bound".
König (King, but its adjectif royal is of French origin, are there other exempls like this one?),
Of course, there are many other English words where you can choose between Germanic and Romance synonyms. In fact, for just about any Germanic word in English, you'll also find one or more Romance words with similar meanings.
As for "king", it's of course
a Germanic word. Yes, the usual corresponding adjective is Romance "royal" (or more rarely Germanic "kingly" and Latin "regal"), but most other Germanic languages also have words derived from the same Romance root as "royal", like e.g. German
Royalist.
Handel (commerce), etc etc.
Again, this is not a lost Germanic word, but merely semantic drift. English
"handle" is cognate with German
Handel, and in fact, it's closer to the original meaning, which was derived straight from "hand".
That leaves us with only one real example in your list.
Moreover, I am wondering whether it is possible to purify English vocabulary, that is to replace as much as possible words of French or Latin origin by either corresponding words of Germanic origin in use or old English words that had been forgotten or new words but based on old English roots or Germanic roots. I have some suggestions such as: arrive replaced by come, language by speech, combat by fight, construct by build, dictionary by wordbook, Germany by Dutchland (accordingly German by Dutch, Dutch that we use by Netherlandish), etc.
Of course, such a change would be impossible to impose in practice. However, in principle, it wouldn't be difficult to construct such a "purified", almost purely Germanic English, together with modern technical terminology and everything.
In fact, there have been some attempts along these lines. The famous SF writer Poul Anderson once wrote a popular-science essay on atomic theory titled "Uncleftish Beholding", in which he used an invented scientific terminology derived almost solely from Germanic English roots.
You can find an excerpt from Anderson's essay and a link to the complete version here. I think the article wonderfully demonstrates how very much Germanic English still is. It reads very naturally and to anyone familiar with the topic, every single sentence is perfectly clear. (Moreover, as someone with a solid background in physics, I can vouch that the essay is completely accurate scientifically, in fact much more accurate than what usually passes for pop-science.)
As a side note, I once read somewhere that if one was supposed to speak English using only Germanic words, the Romance word most difficult to replace would be "to use". Anderson has cleverly opted to use "to wield" instead in his essay.
