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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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.

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