Why is English not considered a Romance “language if ~60-80% of words come from latin?
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It is not the vocabulary but the origin of the language itself and its grammatical structure that determine which language family a language is in. You can swap out the entire English vocabulary and replace it with words from another language without changing the grammar and it would still be considered a Germanic language. Also note that the vast majority of the most commonly used and basic words in English are in fact of Germanic origin. Japanese is not considered to be a “dialect”/regional language of Chinese for the same reason.
Because its base isn’t even in Latin but the same language tree as German, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish. The earliest form of the language has no Latin words whatsoever. Read Beowulf in the original Old English and it’s totally unintelligible compared to the English we use today.
If English were a Romance language just because of the Latin influence then Japanese is a Sinitic language because it uses Chinese characters and loanwords.
It’s based on the origins of the language. English can be traced to proto-germanic languages while the romance languages decend from vulgar-latin.
English only has so many latin words because of the Noman conquest of England back in the 11th century. That caused latin words (of French origin) to become part of the vocabulary.
Despite the latin words, structurally english is still grammatically and structurally germanic.
If I take the old tool shed in my back yard, disassemble it into boards of wood, and use that wood to make a dining table and chairs, that doesn’t mean that I’m eating breakfast on my shed. The shape and structure of it is what matters, not the stuff it’s made out of. It doesn’t matter if it’s 0% old shed wood or 100%: it’s still a table and chairs. The material is less important than the structure.
The structure of English isn’t related to Latin. It’s closer to German. Romance languages generally feature gendered nouns, matched gendered adjectives, and verbs conjugated by endings to reflect the person, tense, and voice. English uses helper verbs to convey this information (I run, I will run, I would run, I have run, etc.) which clearly sets it apart from the romance family.
A language is basically two things, grammar and vocabulary. You can get a word wrong, the vocabulary, and still be understood as long as you adhere to the grammar. So the grammar is generally considered the base of the language.
The grammar in English comes more from the Germanic than it does from the Romance.
Also, it’s not 60-80% it’s only about 40%
All the short words are Anglo-Saxon. Everything longer is borrowed from Romance languages such as French and Latin. We have also borrowed from ancient Greek. The base though comes from a mixture of old Frisian and Norse. That is what created Anglo-Saxon which is the base of present day English language.
Because we don’t follow Latin grammar, especially adjectives changing number or gender according to the noun. Best of all we can end a sentence with proposition if we want to.
Because English grammar is a very simplified German.
Basically the entire “house” of English is Germanic, the foundations, the walls.
Only the “facade” and some “decorations” of the English house are romance in origin.
Because language families are moreso based on grammar than on vocabulary. Transfer of words between languages happens all the time, you’d be surprised what farflung regions some words come from. Chocolate? Originally an aztec word. Algorithm? Derives from arabic. Orange? Of persian origin.
However, grammatically, english is more closely related to germanic languages than romance ones. For example, adjectives in latin languages generally come after the word they modify, whereas germanic languages put them in front. Guess which one english does. Romance languages also have a LOT of conjugations. Let’s take a basic example, to walk.
|French|Italian|German|English|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|je marche|io cammino|ich gehe|i walk|
|tu marches|tu cammini|du gehst|you walk|
|il marche|lui/lei cammina|er/sie/es geht|he/she/it walks|
|nous marchons|noi camminamo|wir gehen|we walk|
|vous marchez|voi camminate|ihr geht|you walk|
|ils marschent|loro camminano|sie gehen|they walk|
Note here that, while “To walk” is a regular verb in german, english, and italian, it is not, in fact, regular in french.
Also, the amount of vocabulary stemming from any one language doesn’t tell you much. A lot of technical words, for instance, are derived from latin, because europeans just really liked making up latin words for scientific things. However, there is this interesting distribution in languages where 20% of words in a language make up 80% of all words used. If you now look at those 20% of words, what you find is that the majority of them is germanic in origin, not romance.
Another way to look at this is to look at regular vs. irregular verbs. Generally, irregular verbs will be ones from that language itself, whereas loanwords will generally be regular. This is because, as the word is loaned, we apply existing grammar rules to it instead of making up new forms that would make it irregular (interesting detail here, the more common a word is, the more likely it is to be irregular, because the irregular forms of less common words just get forgotten over time) If you run the numbers for english, what you find is, once again, that most irregular verbs, about 70% of them, in fact, are germanic, even though anywhere from 60 to 80% of english words are romance words.
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