Why does English borrow from the Latin language?

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As far as I’ve been taught, English is not a romance language like French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish or Romanian. The Roman Empire didn’t stretch as far as the United Kingdom, and English is an Anglo-Saxonic language closer to German or Dutch than, say, Italian. So… how come words like “ambulance” (ambulat) and “transition” (transit) seem to be directly ripped from the original Latin?

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12 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Probably through French: the noble were speaking French in England at some point, after the Norman Conquest. That’s why you’ll see that many «high-tier» words (in education, legislation etc.) look like French and «low-tier» (basic stuff and food) look like German.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Conquest

Anonymous 0 Comments

The Roman Empire did stretch as far as the United Kingdom. It had control of pretty much all of England for more than 300 years.

But not that much Latin population remained in England after the fall of the Empire. It was a mostly celtic population until the invasion or migration of the germanic tribes.

But in 1066 the Norman Invasion brought a french nobility to Enlgand and it remained as much for centuries. During that time the Nobility was speaking French and the population was English and this brought a lot of French word into the language. You can see this divide in food. The word for the animal is often germanic like Cow, while the meat is often french like Beef. The nobility was eating the food cooked by others, the population was eating the animal they prepared.

Latin was the language of the religion for a long time, and so it’s normal that it affected the language over centuries.

Anonymous 0 Comments

1. Normans invaded England and brought French with them.
2. Scientists like to use Latin roots to name things.
3. Some bored aristocrats thought Latin was “cool” so they made changes to English to make it more similar to Latin, even when that didn’t make sense.

So English has Germanic grammar, but lots of French and Latin vocabulary.

Anonymous 0 Comments

First of all, the Roman Empire absolutely did stretch into England and England was a major part of the empire for almost 500 years, and quite important trading partner before and after.

Second, latin was in large use in England since the time of the Romans. Third, Many words came from other sources in english, such as French, Dutch, German, and many from old norse.

Its of absolutely no surprise that latin is found in English. It’s the opposite, if there was no latin, that would be really odd.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The Roman Empire did stretch to the United Kingdom! Hadrian’s wall was the northern border, roughly equivalent to the modern day English-Scottish border. The Roman presence lasted roughly 300 years in England and Wales.

But to answer your question: Latin influence in English comes mainly through French words. Those were adopted due to the Norman (basically Vikings who started speaking Frankish/Middle French) conquest of 1066, French being the language of English and European royalty, the language of law, science, diplomacy, theology and intellectual discourse for hundreds of years. In the renaissance it also became customary to use New Latin as the language for any kind of written publication in sciences, law, letters etc.

Many royals and diplomats in Europe communicated solely in French, law-french or new Latin well into the 18th century. English was influenced through all of these mentioned channels and today 30% of English vocabulary can be linked directly to French origins, therefore to the Romance language family, coming directly from Latin.

PS: funny anecdote, George I was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1 August 1714 and did not speak English at all. He communicated in French and Latin with the English nobility, government and his ministers, but also spoke high German, low German/Dutch and Italian. Even without speaking English, his reign is considered very successful and he is the founder of the English royal house of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Hanover line (lasting 200 years), which later directly became the royal house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (renamed Windsor in the 1st world war).

Anonymous 0 Comments

Other than the fact that those are all technical terms, The reason is all the languages you mentioned are of the Indo-European branch of languages so they share a common root that linguists call Proto-IndoEuropean (PIE) though its existence hasn’t yet been proven.

Anonymous 0 Comments

English is a Germanic language. The Anglians (from where the name England comes from) and Saxons were German tribes who moved to Britain some time after the fall of the Roman empire. And the Celtic tribes who lived in Britain before them were originally from what is today Bavaria. English is a Germanic language and have most of the hallmarks of a Germanic language.

However the language have borrowed a lot of words from Romance languages, an extreme amount of words. Firstly the Germanic tribes in Britain were conquered by French nobles. And for hundreds of years the nobles in Britain spoke French. So a ton of words entered the English language from French through the nobles. But even after the British nobles started speaking English they still wanted to sound more educated then the peasants and would prefer Latin or Greek words over English derived words. Latin and Greek was common languages at universities.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You’d think that the Euro soccer cup was just an accident, but actually plans for an Italian domination over the UK started thousands of years ago.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Came here to say what everyone else said. The Roman empire went all the way to the UK. (look up Hadrian’s Wall, it’s the northern frontier of the Roman empire. It’s notable for a lot of things, including the origin of what is believed to be the world’s first party invite – it’s a fascinating story)

Anyway, the over-extension of the Roman empire was part of the contributing factor to both bringing down the empire **and** the creation of an amazing infrastructure of roads and aquaducts throughout Europe.