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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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.
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