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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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.
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