Why is English not considered a Romance “language if ~60-80% of words come from latin?
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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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