Why is English not considered a Romance “language if ~60-80% of words come from latin?
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Ooh, something I know about!!
Languages change over time. Given enough time, they become totally new languages (though the line for that is blurry.) For example, Old English changed into Middle English, which changed into Modern English. Old English itself comes from a language called Proto-Germanic, which comes from Proto-Indo-European.
Using this, we can construct a (simplified) family tree for Modern English: PIE > Proto-Germanic > Old English > Middle English > Modern English. Obviously, this is glossing over a lot of details, but it’s good enough for our purposes.
Compare this to Spanish. Spanish’s family tree would look something like: PIE > Proto-Italic > Latin > Old Spanish > Modern Spanish. (Linguists rarely speak of “Middle Spanish,” but note that Old Spanish and Middle English were spoken at the same time.)
Because Latin is part of the “family tree” of Spanish, we call it a Romance language. Because it’s not part of the “family tree” of English, we don’t call it a Romance language. Middle English did take a lot of loanwords from French, but it didn’t *come from* French, any more than Spanish comes from English because of loanwords like “sándwich” or “básquetbol.”
[Side note: You’ll notice that both English and Spanish start with Proto-Indo-European. Other languages that come from PIE include Hindi, Russian, and Farsi. If you want to learn more about it, I highly recommend the book *The Horse, the Wheel, and Language*—it’s fascinating, and I could talk about this for hours!]
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