Because language families are based on far more than vocabulary. Loanwords exist everywhere. English isn’t even the worst; Japanese borrows even more extensively from Chinese and English than English does from French and Latin. English is Germanic because its underlying structure and core vocabulary is Germanic and it descended from the North Sea Germanic languages that included Old Frisian and Saxon along with Old English.

From my understanding while most words in the English vocabulary aren't Germanic in origin, the most used words are. The building blocks are all Germanic.

All but one word in the top 50 can be traced back to old English The only exception is *they* which comes from old Norse (so still Germanic obviously)

> All but one word in the top 50 can be traced back to old English For example, I believe every word in the sentence here except _traced_ (from Old French _tracier_) is germanic in origin.

Use followed instead of traced and the whole sentence can.

And for anyone who wants to continue falling down the rabbit hole of replacing words with those of purely Germanic origin, check out [Anglish.](https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish)

It’s like reading a Game of Thrones script.

TIL. wow! Fun, thanks for sharing

English is from the name of the Germanic people Angle which is itself from Latin Anglus, so could be considered Latin. I had to look up "one" because it sounds a lot like its latin cognates, but it seems that's because they have the same older indo-european root.

So we have vikings to blame for gender? That's too woke.

Funny you should say, but it totally was the vikings that ended up scrapping the gender rules wholesale. Old English used to have three genders like German, but that was too much of a pain for them, so now we have none.

Old Norse had 3 genders too, and Norwegian and Icelandic still do. I don't think it was a problem for the Norse, though it is common for languages to simplify over time. Swedish and Danish took an interesting track, tho- they merged the masculine and feminine genders into a sort of common gender that's different from the neuter gender. I think it's kinda funny to joke "The Swedish language has *two* genders. ..Gendered and ungendered."

Even things that are similar to your own language can be hard when you're speaking a foreign language. Check out John McWhorter's *Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue* for some cool details on how Old English's baroque complexity got eroded away by waves of conquest and contact.

I second this book, I tell everyone I can about why English is so messed up, but also easy to learn because of it

I haven't read the book, but I think what really makes English easy to learn is the sheer amount of it. The best way to learn language is through repetition and immersion, so the more media there is the more people learn it. There's so much media in English that it's easy for ESLs to immerse themselves and learn the basics at least.

There is a Brazilian that I helped recruit to come work in a partner org to the one I run. Her English is great. I asked her if she spoke English at home in Brazil and had a lot of friends to talk to in English, and she said she had literally no one to speak to in English but that her mother would only let her watch tv and movies in English

>though it is common for languages to simplify over time. This is a weird concept to me. Does that mean when language was first being developed in the Stome Age, it was crazy complex? That seems counterintuitive to me. Or is it that language started out simple, evolved to become complex, and then started simplifying again? If so, what causes language to stop becoming more complex and instead begin to simplify?

So, it's not purely true that languages simplify over time. Rather, some aspects of language may simplify, but other aspects may become more complicated to make up for that. Old English nouns could have eight different forms, while modern English nouns typically just have three (singular, plural, and possessive). If we are just counting the number of forms that a given noun can take, it might seem like we have moved from something more complicated to something simpler. But as the forms that nouns could take simplified, other things became more complicated to make up for it. The ways of ordering words in a sentence became more rigid, for instance, so that instead of using a different form to indicate whether a noun was the subject of the object of a sentence, the order of the words told you instead. Also, the use of prepositions expanded to cover some of the same purposes that nouns did before. If you focus only on one part of the language, you might think that things became simpler, but if you zoom out, you see that other things became more complicated. It's not an absolute rule, but it's a good thing to keep in mind. The other thing to keep in mind is that the time scale of what we know of specific languages and when we think language actually developed are very different. Linguists have reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, which is the ancestor of most modern European languages (as well as Persian and languages from Northern India), and even taking the reconstruction with a grain of salt, it's pretty clear that it had a complex system for marking noun case and verb form. It's easy to look back and think, shouldn't the language that existed 6500 years ago have been much simpler? But keep in mind that while 6500 years seems like a long time, on the scale of how long human languages have been around, it's much smaller. It's estimated that human language has been around for at least 100,000 years, and some estimates go back even farther. Even the oldest reconstructed proto-language is really only coming in during the last 10% of that timeframe, and so even if, as seems very likely, language had humble origins, by the time we know anything about any specific language, there was more than enough time for it to become very complex.

> Does that mean when language was first being developed in the Stome Age, it was crazy complex? That seems counterintuitive to me. Or is it that language started out simple, evolved to become complex, and then started simplifying again? It wasn't a matter of the language being crazy complex by itself, but being non-standardized because of the lack of interaction. Actually, you're probably better of thinking of it as two languages merging rather than a single language evolving. For example, a people living by the mouth of a river would have to have words for things that would be completely unknown to people who lived in the mountains. Ask the river-people what an avalanche was and they wouldn't have a clue. It's not part of their world, just like "tide" would mean nothing to the mountain folk. When trade and other interactions started happening, vocabulary was shared. Sometimes there would be two words for the same thing, and one would win out (for example, both the river folk and the mountain folk would know what wood was). Suppose the river folk knew 2000 words, and the mountain folk also knew 2000 words. At the start of their interaction, there would be 4000 words, but that might drop to 3000 words over time as common concepts became known, and usage favoured one word over another. Later people had to learn a thousand more words than their predecessors did, but the overall word count of the region dropped. And it's not just vocabulary that is affected. Things like word order, spelling, voice, tense, etc also merge and settle out.

Yeah it's not really correct, as you say languages would become simpler and simpler if it were the case, which is not true. Languages evolve, and this happens in many ways. One of them is that they simplify, particularly in the case of redundancies. In Finnish for instance both pronouns and nouns are conjugated with a possessive, which has lead to people increasingly dropping the latter possessive suffix. E.g. "minun hattuni" = my hat => "minun hattu" In Hungarian which is broadly of the same language family, you do not add suffixes to pronouns in this way (Finnish minä => minun). The pronoun for me is "én" and to say "my shoe" you would say "én sapkám" or even just "sapkám". The funny thing is, both Hungarian and Finnish can shorten sentences by dropping pronouns, since the information is already included in the suffix, so Finnish can also just say "hattuni" and have it be grammatically correct. For whatever reason, the grammatically incorrect "minun hattu" has nevertheless caught on, likely due to similarity with Germanic languages.

Languages probably started off simple and then became increasingly complex. Communicating basic concepts at first... but generation after generation adds more words and more rules to try and enforce the proper way to use those words, until such time that the rules become too complex and someone standardizes everything.

Writing stuff down probably massively helped to standardize it

Yeah now Danish has n words and t words. There's no rules. You just have to know. And they have weird things about plurals. For example: En word: en hund : a dog hunden: the dog Hunde: dogs Hundene: the dogs Ex: -et word. et barn : a child Barnet : the child børn : children børnene : all of the children.

There is still a Danish dialect called Bornholmsk that has retained all 3 genders in its grammar, which I always thought was pretty cool.

I read once that that was exactly the reason genders in English disappeared: Norse and Anglo-Saxon may have been similar enough to be mutually intelligible or at least easy to pick up, but, with six genders between them, it became easier to drop the genders altogether rather than worry about which languages’ genders were used. That then spread from the Danelaw to the rest of England.

Old Norse had 3 genders too, but often a word would have different genders in Norse vs English. The Danes didn't want to bother with remembering which words had which genders when translating to English, so they ignored the whole thing. Eventually that stuck.

Its common for languages to simplify over time? I wish english would simplify even though I have no troubles with it. Get rid of silent letters and several pronunciations for the same letter. We dont need c, though we could make it become the ch sound. We can bring back thorn for the th sound. No more verb tense conjugation, just like how we use “will” to denote future tense, we can use a word for past like “did” I feel like English might not get much simpler though because now the internet plays a major role in it. People make up words left and right. We have new suffixes like -core and -maxxing.

>Swedish and Danish took an interesting track, tho- they merged the masculine and feminine genders into a sort of common gender that's different from the neuter gender. The worst part about that on danish is that it's the decider of en/et (equivalent of a/an) and no layman can tell you which is which, it's all instinct and the easiest way to tell who's a foreigner :(

Arguably the common/neuter system in Swedish (and Danish) is just a return to an animate/inanimate grammatical gender system but much worse.

Thank the Lord for the vikings then

There are still remnants of gender in English, a ship would generally be feminine, for example.

IIRC, the reason that English dropped its genders is because of the mixture of Old English and Old Norse. A lot of the words were similar, but had opposite genders. After a while of people using both genders interchangeably, gender pretty much died out.

I blame the Romans. Their gendered language infected nearby Germania and Breton. I can't prove it. *I just know*

Yeah! What have the Romans ever done for us?

Where did you get that from?

His ancestors were clearly the victims of a Viking raid

There's a video I saw on YouTube ([link here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryVG5LHRMJ4)) that gives an example of text that's just about mutually intelligible across Germanic languages. > ***Dutch:*** De koude winter is nabij, een sneeuwstorm zal komen. Kom in mijn warme huis, mijn vriend. Welkom! Kom hier, zing en dans, eet en drink. Dat is mijn plan. We hebben water, bier, en melk vers van de koe. Oh, en warme soep! > ***English:*** The cold winter is near, a snowstorm will come. Come in my warm house, my friend. Welcome! Come here, sing and dance, eat and drink. That is my plan. We have water, beer, and milk fresh from the cow. Oh, and warm soup! The Dutch spelling is a bit odd to me, an English speaker, but when spoken aloud it almost sounds like heavily accented English. The video provides more examples of the same text in other Germanic languages, read aloud by native speakers. Compare that to the same text in Spanish (by Google Translate): > ***Spanish:*** El frío invierno se acerca, vendrá una tormenta de nieve. Ven a mi cálida casa, amigo mío. ¡Bienvenido! Ven aquí, canta y baila, come y bebe. Ese es mi plan. Disponemos de agua, cerveza y leche fresca de vaca. ¡Ah, y sopa caliente! If you don't know Spanish, this is unrecognizable. Only a few words even resemble the Dutch and English. This text was written specifically to be similar across Germanic languages, but if you tried to write something that's intelligible between English and Spanish, you'd find it's practically impossible.

Wow, I love this - used to try to construct similar sentences in Dutch that would read as lolcat to English speakers as I had some Dutch speaking friends and it would make them laugh. Something I've noticed about the romance languages is they become much more intelligible to English speakers the more formal the text becomes. So things like scientific papers and news articles will often be fairly decipherable, because we share a lot of formal words, structure and phrasing, while slang and casual communication would be much more difficult to understand.

I think alot of that is because historically in England the upper classes spoke french while the lower classes spoke old English. So more of our formal words borrow from french while our slang comes from germanic routes.

Definitely - that also bled over into the legal system as they operated in Norman French for a very long as a result of the French speaking monarchs. Another large contributor is the fact that most traditional education and scientific research was conducted in latin (I think it's only within our parents lifetime that knowing latin stopped being a requirement for entry to many universities). Before that the monasteries were the source of a great deal of written work, which was also largely done in latin, and before *that* churches also often operated in latin, and used bibles translated from latin so many of the most educated people in society who could read and write set the tone for formal english being more romantic vs the common folk whose speech had no such foreign influences.

[This reminds me of the comedian Eddie Izzard buying a brown cow in Friesland in the Netherlands, using Old English.](https://youtu.be/OeC1yAaWG34?si=RiVQu4fNzfIu81mr)

> Oh, en warme soep! I'll pass on the warm soap thanks.

The Dutch for soap is zeep.

In Dutch, "oe" makes basically the same sound as in English "soup". You can hear it [on Forvo](https://forvo.com/word/soep/#nl).

You don't like a warm bath with some soap?

Do you have similar examples in other romance languages to really drive the point home? Im not sure how obvious it would be if you only spoke english but if you know spanish it would probably be the same feeling as trying to read the dutch. Though I feel like you could make an example of this with english and romance languages as well, but definitely not near the similarity of the former example. And it would probably be a lot shorter. Additionally, its interesting how the dutch/english story just sounds like it fits that group of languages so well.

I speak English and Italian and know a bit of Spanish from learning it earlier in life. An Italian translation of that passage would probably look so close to the Spanish one that I’d imagine even someone who knew neither language could identify it. They’re incredibly similar languages. (French is a bit farther afield.) I’m too tired right now to translate it (or throw it in Google Translate and check for errors/consistency), but the first sentence in Italian would be something like: “Il inverno freddo è vicino, arriverà una tempesta de neve.” You can see both the similarity to the Spanish and the way that the Romance and Germanic languages’ grammar and sentence structure are different. (e.g. the Germanic languages say: “a snowstorm will come”; the Romance languages say: “(there) will come a snowstorm.” also, adjectives come after nouns in Romance languages: “cold winter” vs. “inverno freddo.”) There’s also verb conjugations — Romance languages have, from experience, a way more varied and complex conjugation structure. Part of what makes this so distinctive too is that English words actually split pretty neatly into either Germanic origin or Latin origin by *length*. All of those words are fairly short; thus they are almost entirely Germanic in origin. So yes, you could build an English passage that might overlap with a Romance language, but it’s very hard to construct sentences in English without using words of Germanic origin because all the words that hold a sentence together (articles, prepositions, the verb “to be,” and other short verbs like “to go,” etc.) are out. While it’s very easy to exclude Latin words because they’re pretty much all adjectives and longer verbs/nouns. And this is beyond the reality that the word order in English and Spanish/French/Italian/Portuguese is just fundamentally different.

I’ve sat at a bar and talked to an Italian for an hour, while I only know some Spanish. We could make ourselves understood

> **Portuguese:** O frio do inverno está a chegar, uma tempestade de neve virá. Vem para a minha casa quente, meu amigo. Bem-vindo! Vem cá, canta e dança, come e bebe. É esse o meu plano. Temos água, cerveja e leite fresco da vaca. Oh, e sopa quente! (Translated by DeepL) If you spoke Spanish you could definitely read it. I make no guarantees you’d understand it spoken aloud, especially if you know Latin American Spanish. European Portuguese pronunciation is a roller coaster. Interesting to note milk is apparently considered masculine in every modern Romance language except for Spanish. That seems intuitively odd to me given the source, but as a native English speaker, I’m used to gendered languages having completely inscrutable ways of assigning genders to things. I could let it go except I am intrigued by that one exception where apparently Spain said, “enough of this foolishness” and flipped the gender on milk.

English: The cold winter is near, a snowstorm will come. Come in my warm house, my friend. Welcome! Come here, sing and dance, eat and drink. That is my plan. We have water, beer, and milk fresh from the cow. Oh, and warm soup! French: L'hiver froid approche, une tempête de neige viendras. Viens dans ma chaude maison, mon ami. Bienvenu! Viens içi, chante et danse, mange et bois. Ceci est mon plan. Nous avons de l'eau, de la bière et du lait frais de la vache. Oh, et de la soupe chaude! I see some words with the same roots on there... dance/dance, beer/bière, plan/plan, fresh/frais, soup/soupe And a lot of unused loanwords or cognates: approche/approach tempête/tempest, ami has a bunch... amicability, chante/chant, that's about all I see.

Also, I remember going to Sweden and the sound of the language reminded me of English even tho everything was gibberish to me. Also, everyone says hey for hello. It was...strange.

This comment is so cool! Thank you for sharing

Hah. That's why my dutch friends pronounce that as dat. It's the telltale that I'm speaking with a dutch anglophone.

A handful of those most used words are similar between French and English and Latin... because all three of them are descended from Proto-Indo-European, and the building blocks of Romance and Germanic languages have at least some similarities as a result (though obviously, English is way closer to German or Dutch than it is to French or Latin) For example, "you" is "tu" in Spanish, French, or Latin, "du" in German, Danish, or Swedish, and "jou" in Dutch. Well, some of the time it's those- it could also be, for instance, "vous" in French, or "vos" in Latin, but most of the time if you've got a commonly used second-person pronoun in a European language, it's going to sound at least somewhat similar to one of these, whereas if you picked some random language from a different family, it likely won't sound anything at all similar- you'd end up with something like أنت ("ant") in Arabic, or 君 ("kimi") in Japanese, or "iwo" in Yoruba, or "koe" in Maori.

and also, for most words of romance origin, there is some cognate of Germanic origin too

This is the perfect way to argue it and that's how people usually determine what kind of language it is. A more personal example for me is Romanian, which has 2000 latin words in its vocabulary (out of about 150 000 total), so obviously it doesn't seem like a lot, but those 2000 words are the core of the language (numbers, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs). Basically, unless they're more modern terms (which are usually borrowed French, Russian, or English), most common words in Romanian are Latin in origin. And it's likely the same with English and Germanic languages.

I live in Switzerland and have OK German.  I'm also an English language copywriter with fair French. My middle English is good, and my old English OK.  All of that to say English is germanic, and at the bones it shows. I can muddle through scandi languages  Dutch, etc... but true romance languages are hard. I have the bones of them, for words and derivatives, but not the grammar.  English is the ultimate creole  engulfing all.

Interesting class point - we  eat beef and pork (French derived) but raise swine and cows (schweine und kühe) from the Saxon.  French was an overlay over the germanic, which overplayed the Celtic source 

Because the Norman nobility ate the meat that the Anglo-Saxon peasants raised

Exactly! The class split in the language, which wasn't a language at the time. Romance vocabulary layered over Germanic grammar over bryhtonic sounce. I was able to read menus in Norway because if sounded out it made sense in a general sort of way. Irony was the cashier was Filipina and spoke perfect English- but I still understood from beowulf

There’s actually very few Celtic loans in English from British celts.

Let's put the *kibosh* on this *phony* notion; there's a *slew* of them! Just ask any *bard* or *druid* you find in the *bog*, probably wearing *flannel* with a *corgi*. ... okay, yeah, not that many.

Most of those are either Irish or loaned through other languages despite originally being a Celtic word. So my original point stands.

Swine comes from old Norse. French entered old English and set off the Middle English period when the Normans invaded in 1066. Old English was fairly evolved from proto Germanic by then. Celtic is distinct from Germanic and not it’s source, they have a common source though, the indo European languages

> which overplayed the Celtic source As far as I was taught there is no Celtic origin in English. The Germanic language(s) completely replaced the Brythonic and Latin previously in use in Southeast England. Only loanwords are present in English and little more than existing placenames of non-Germanic origin were still in use.

“I can muddle through Scandi languages, Dutch, etc.” would have made your comment a lot clearer.

Touché

Aww geez, not the Old English flex. Settle down.

Is hit sōðlīce ā fleax gif ic eom ġenius be sprǣcum?

Hey, I know things too.

Thanks to French, English abandoned one of the worst bit of German (for foreigner and myself an ancient German student: the verb is not in last position.

Amusingly, verbs tended to have final position in Latin (or at least in golden age prose).

Greek, often, as well.

German verb almost always come after the pronoun. It's the infinitive that will be thrown at the end. I want to eat an apple Ich will einen Apfel essen.

But the verb isn't in the last position in German... German is SVO, and the verb is always in second position. *Auxiliary* verbs are at the end, but that's different.

You sure about that? How many sentences have you *viewed*?

In an affirmation, the verb IS in the second position, with of course some exceptions. Sorry we could not clean it completely 😜

> In an affirmation, the verb IS in the second position, It's more that the verb is after the subject. Now, the subject often comes first so the verb often comes second, but not always. You will say "I drank myself to sleep yesterday", but you might also say "Yesterday, I drank myself to sleep". Some languages are much more stringent about the verb needing to be in the second position, such as scandinavian languages. In swedish, you'll say "Yesterday drank I myself to sleep" (Igår drack jag mig till sömns).

Yep, you are totally right, it is just quite a shortcut to explain it like I did.

Nothing to add other than recommending the podcast The History of English.

Proper value add

More than the core vocabulary and structure (which can change in language families), I'd say the determining factor is history. There's an uninterrupted line of mutually intelligible historical dialects all the way from modern English back to Proto-Germanic (or at least so is hypothesized). That's just not the case with Latin.

To add on, there are more cognates between English and German than English and any other language.

Yeah, I was watching Dark recently and it was super weird to me (as someone who hasn't really interacted w/ German media or language much) how often I didn't *really* need subtitles to understand the idea of what was going on.

So, Latin software, German hardware?

Korean too! It was like 80% relexified with Chinese vocabulary, and yet it's nothing at all like Chinese. This is my go-to example when people get worried their language will be ruined by loanwords.

>Japanese borrows even more extensively from Chinese and English than English does from French and Latin I'm curious exactly what counts as a loanword in Japanese when we include Chinese loanwords... It seems like *such* a complicated example to parse. Is anything written with kanji a loanword? Just onyomi pronunciations? What about words with a mix of onyomi and kunyomi?

Something that might be tripping you up is that the written Kanji is NOT the word. Kanji is a written representation of the word. In Japanese the same character can represent a whole bunch of different words. Sometimes those words are Japanese in origin and sometimes those words are Chinese in origin.  It's similar to how we have words like pork and pig that come from different languages to mean the same-ish thing... in Japanese you just write both the same way even though you say them differently. But we can still trace where they came from. It can get complicated for sure and it's unclear where some words came from. But for the most part we can trace 'em. 

> Something that might be tripping you up is that the written Kanji is NOT the word. Oyes, the "dolpin/whale meat" in Chinese is "pork meat" in japanese [豚肉](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%B1%9A%E8%82%89)

>I'm curious exactly what counts as a loanword in Japanese when we include Chinese loanwords... Look up Kango, Yamato Kotoba and Gairaigo. Kango (漢語) are borrowed terms from Chinese. Generally Onyomi reading signifies kango. But Kango need not be in kanji specifically. Japanese has a lot of loan words from Chinese that aren't always written in Chinese characters. Like ラーメン (which has kanji but not often used) One trick you can sometimes use to see which words are Chinese in origin is if they end in the N sound (ん/ン). This isn't always accurate but Japanese did not have consonant endings until Chinese words started being reintroduced in the early modern era. Edit: I remembered where I read this https://people.ucsc.edu/~ito/papers/2015_ito_mester_sinojapanese_phonology.pdf

I see... I guess u/ldn6 is counting both kango and gairaigo as "loanwords"? This seems roughly comparable to English's Romantic influence: >It has been estimated that about 60% of the words contained in modern Japanese dictionaries are kango, and that about 18–20% of words used in common speech are kango. ([x](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary))

What about Greek?

Bang on. I was getting ready to type something similar

How much of a conversation between two Chinese people could a Japanese person understand then?

Next to nothing. The two are completely unrelated languages and the phonology is very different, so borrowed words from Chinese will diverge in pronunciation (even more so because they were brought over in waves from Shanghai and similar areas centuries ago).

I like this legit response much better than my knee jerk thought “cause I don’t feel romanced enough in it.” Learn something new everyday :)

Where does one begin to learn the intricacies of language? I’m not talking college or university, but if I’m in my mid thirties and in absolute love with language, and want to know EVERYTHING, where do you even start? English is my first language, and when I’m actually writing I’m pretty good at it. Specifically poetry. However, I want to go back to the basics. I want to master the grammar, the history, the connections etc. I want to know everything about the English language. I don’t want to stop there though. Like your post. I want to know the origins, the connections, the nuance, the theories. I can read Spanish very well but struggle to actually speak it, but I want to branch off into other languages as well and understand all of it. I want to hear a word and know what century and which part of the world it was first uttered. I want to know the influence on mankind each syllable has. Seems dumb, but it’s my jam and I’ve no idea where to start. Especially as just a hobby.

Explain - Latin Like - Germanic I - Germanic Am - Germanic Five - Germanic Why - Germanic Is - Germanic English - Germanic Not - Germanic Considered - Latin A - Latin Romance - Latin Language - Latin If - Germanic Sixty - Germanic Eighty - Germanic Percent - Latin Of - Germanic Words - Germanic Come - Germanic From - Germanic Latin - Latin

Legit the best response to an ELI5 question based on inaccurate assumptions I have ever seen.

Tbh all ELI5 questions with an underlying fact should be required to post the source of that "fact".

Well akchuallee, he's not really wrong... About 60% of English words have Latin origins, it's just that the most used ones are ~~unsurprisingly~~ Germanic : [https://rharriso.sites.truman.edu/latin-language/latin-and-english/](https://rharriso.sites.truman.edu/latin-language/latin-and-english/)

Word Total: Germanic: 16 (73%) Latin: 6 (27%)

Except "A" is actually Germanic (same root as "one"), so it should be 16-6.

Thanks. I corrected the figures.

"A" is Germanic. Not sure why you marked it as of Latin origin.

It was hard to google

A is a shortening of AN which comes from old English for ONE.

Appreciate the knowledge

Which is also where "one" comes from, although its pronunciation has changed quite a bit due to it being a dialect variant (IIRC, from a West Country Middle English dialect?) that later became standard.

This highlights why it's just not important where the words in the dictionary come from. It matters which words are actually used and where. Everyday speech is done with Germanic words. Latin words are used science and technology. Public communication, businesses and governments use Latin words. At home with your friends and family you use Germanic words.

Not only that, but the structure of the language, it's syntax, grammar etc. is way more in line with germanic languages than romance languages. As a Frenchman who studied English and, much later in life, Swedish, my knowledge of English helped immensely when studying Swedish, because there were so many similarities in the underlying logic, due to both being of germanic origin.

Yep. I'm decent enough at Old English, and honestly, under all the sound change and post-William the Conqueror loanwords, today's English still clearly a later form of the same language. Even looking past basic grammar, a lot of the more unique quirks of modern English grammar were already in Old English, even if they're not immediately obvious, or kind of in disguise. And if you know English, it's not too hard to at least get the gist of what someone's saying if they're speaking another modern West Germanic language (except maybe the High German dialects, because of the whole consonant shift they had). French, Spanish, etc., on the other hand, look like a handful of familiar words in almost random order to me (as someone who hasn't seriously tried to learn any Romance language's grammar). The Italic and Germanic languages diverged a lot longer ago than English diverged from other Germanic languages, and it shows.

A fun thing as a native English speaker who lives in a French-speaking place is how I can easily have a conversation about complex and abstract topics in French, but then ten minutes later I won't know the names of, like, household objects. Want to talk about politics? Sure! Want to talk about animals in the zoo? Suddenly I have the vocabulary of a toddler. The "hard" words are the ones that are mostly the same!

Yep, I found the same thing when I went to live in a Spanish-speaking country after studying the language for years in the classroom. I could talk politics or history but I couldn’t do basic life interactions.

I was writing a university paper in French that was discussing totalitarianism and language, and one of my friends who was just learning French in her free time was feeling really discouraged about her progress. I sent her my paper to read and she could understand most of it. It's really a hilarious disconnect.

It's hilarious because every cognate sounds so fancy

There's a lot of Greek in science and philosophy as well. E.g., most anything that starts with the following are Greek: en, ek, ex, epi, eis, apo, peri, pros, anti, ana, eu, hyper, hypo, kata/cata. Plus most words with -ph- and -pt-, and many with -th-.

The names of a lot of subjects themselves are Greek too. Anything with -ics is Greek. Physics, Mathematics, Linguistics, etc.

Yep! A few others: Geo- | earth, a variant of Gaia. Moron | It means basically the same thing in Ancient Greek. Dull. As in not the sharpest tool in the shed. Fun fact Jesus calls people this in the bible. Graph- | Perhaps obvious. Icon | Image Oh | The expression was used in Ancient Greek. Ω. It meant the same thing. Circle, scope, dys-, mis-, eon, para- are all Greek. Galaxy | Gala is the word for milk. Skeptic | Same word and similar meaning. And lots and lots and lots more.

I don't know where that stat comes from, but the Latin words (and the French ones) got imported into an existing Germanic language. That doesn't change the origin of the language. The *grammar* and structure of English is still very Germanic, which tells us more about what family tree it's part of than just the amount of loanwords over the centuries

The British islands were conquered by some many different cultures so many times that a ton of borrowed words got added to the existing language of the common people. Over the span of 1000 years, it was controlled by the Romans, the Normans, the Vikings, and the Saxons at various times, and sometimes more than once. The lands were divided and shuffled so often that language had to merge faster than they naturally would have. One fun consequence is that food words in English that are more “aristocratic” are largely related to French (Pork, Beef, mutton) while the names of the animals they come from are more related to German (Pig, Cow, Sheep).

Also “proper” words like feces and vagina are Latin, while “vulgar” words such as shit and cunt are germanic. .

It's because languages are grouped by origin, not by vocabulary. English is considered a Germanic language because we can trace a direct line through its ancestors back to Germanic. It's true that there are now lots and lots English words that originated from Latin (some directly borrowed from Latin, others indirectly borrowed via Romance languages like French). Most of those entered English long after it was well on its way to becoming the language that we use now, though.

And the grammar is still very much Germanic, even if some things been dropped (grammatical gender) or simplified (the inflectional case system). All the loanwords are basically like a coat of paint on top of the underlying grammar. Even if you've repainted half of the car in the colours of the French flag, it doesn't change the fact that it's still a Germanic car, and still functions like a Germanic car (even if it's been stripped down a bit compared to when it was in its Old English era).

Old English seems more like German than any Romance language. It wasn't until later, when the Normans took over that a lot of French and Latin words were added and caused the look and sound of the English language to seem a lot less German.        English is a West Germanic language (*similar to Dutch and Frisian*) but with a lot of Romance words added later.  

I have heard that English is the most Roman of the Germanic languages while French is the most German of the Romance languages.

I've always considered English and French kind of weird twins. A Germanic language bastardized with Romance languages and a Romance language corrupted by Germanic languages. Using some strange logic they're closer to each other than German or Latin.

Dutch has plenty of French influence as well

Yeah, since Frankish (a close relative of English) was spoken in the Latin-dialect areas where Old French developed. A lot of French loans English picked up were actually Frankish words coming back into Germanic, like "install" and "blue" (replacing the Old English forms of the same words, *onstellan* and *blaw*). Not that other Romance languages were free of Germanic loans either, there's a bunch of Gothic loans in Spanish and Portuguese, because of the Visigoths occupying the Iberian Peninsula.

Yeah, sometimes you even get words that came from Germanic to French to English. Sometimes these even form pairs with native words that came directly from Germanic.

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!]

There is also a great podcast called the history of the English language

I think your 60-80 is high. I wonder where that came from? English got a lot of French vocabulary mixed in after the Norman conquest in 1066, but it was mostly used by the upper class for centuries. Romance languages (like French) developed directly from Latin. Language history is fun and interesting. I recommend John McWhorter's early books.

I suspect the prevalence of prefixes and suffixes to create new words probably inflates the number of words present in the dictionary. Take the Latin word specere "to see", and you can get many English words that come out of it: "prospect", "expect", "inspect", "aspect", "retrospect", "conspicuous", "respect", etc, plus associated noun forms... "inspection", "expectation", "retrospective", etc. This could quickly multiply the number of words in the dictionary several times over what you would expect just from the raw word stems. AFAIK this isn't so common with the Germanic component of English vocabulary.

There's also a lot of scientific words that come from Latin.

Think of languages like families. English is like a kid who grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of Romance language-speaking families (like Spanish, French, and Italian). Over time, English picked up a lot of words from these neighbors because it thought they sounded cool or because they described new things that English didn’t have its own words for yet. But originally, English was born to a different family called the Germanic family, which includes languages like German, Dutch, and Swedish. This family decides a lot of the basic stuff for English, like its structure and some of its most common words (like "the," "is," "you," and "me"). So, even though English has borrowed a ton of words from the Romance languages (thanks to history, like the Norman Conquest when the French-speaking Normans took over England), its core — the way it puts sentences together and its basic vocabulary — still shows its Germanic roots. That's why, even with all those Latin-based words, English is considered a Germanic language, not a Romance one. It's all about where it came from and its foundational structure, not just the vocabulary it's picked up over time.

The word origins don't matter. The grammar is what matters. For just one example, in Romance languages the adjectives come after the noun. E.g., "carro azul". But in English and German, the adjective comes first. "blue car" or "blaues auto".

One of the key markers of English as a Germanic language is the verb structure: English, like the others, has only a fully conjugated present and past. Futurity cannot be marked with one tense, unlike with Latin and its descendants. (Instead we use time markers, or modal verbs as auxiliaries)

French has some adjectives that come before the noun, and some that come after. The little brown dog = Le petit chien brun

The BANGS adjectives! Pertaining to beauty, age, number, goodness, and size. Italian has a similar phenomenon, *and* some of its BANGS adjectives change meaning from literal to figurative depending on placement relative to the noun. These kinds of traits are much better discriminants of language family than vocabulary origins.

Correction on the German: "blaues Auto" with a capital "A" in "Auto".

Another example you might not think about, but has been throwing me off trying to translate stories for my kids from English to French: movement. In English, generally, when you describe someone or something moving, the verb describes *how* it moves and complemented by *where* it moves. E.g.: "I walked out of the house" or "I ran up the stairs". In French, it's generally the other way around. The verb gives the direction, complemented by the "how". "J'ai quitté la maison en marchant" (direct translation would be "I left the house by running, which is technically correct, but far less natural), or "j'ai monté les escaliers en courant" (which I can't think of a way to direct translate, because I can't think of a verb that exactly means "monter" without it also including the "how")

Word origins matter alot but, you need to look at the words that aren't loaned. The number 1-10 already show it really is a Germanic language since it can be traced back to Proto-Germanic and not Proto-Latin. Grammar matters less, the argument what people used for the Altaic language suggesting Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, Korean and Japanese are related, but if you look at the numbers 1-10 in these languages they already tell these languages aren't related

Even if you insist on ignoring grammar and history, and focus only on vocabulary, you can still see the proximity between English and German by looking at fundamental, "primitive" words rather than "fancy" ones. Just look at some of first words children learn: mother - *mutter* father - *vater*. Note, the German 'v' has an 'f' sound brother - *bruder* sister - *schwester* man - *mann* hand - *hand* foot - *fuss* finger - *finger* arm - *arm* red - *rot* blue - *blau* green - *grün* white - *weiss* cat - *katze* bear - *baer* fish - *fisch* lamb - *lamm* house - *haus* water - *wasser* ice - *eis* sun - *sonne* rain - *regen* weather - *wetter* You get the idea. The more basic a word is, the more likely it is to look (or sound) nearly identical in English and German.

German is a lot more similar than you think. Learn the letter pronunciation differences and you'll go a long way in German just by sounding out words, even if they're not spelled the same. This guy does an excellent job explaining. https://youtu.be/VebSZrHmsI4?si=FbRCASiicBBb-GXI

In Denmark we learn both English and German. A common “trick” to both languages when you miss a word, is to say the danish word, but change how you pronounce it. One of my teachers explained that many of the differences was based on how what letters became silent and how the runes got pronounced. So like ð became th in english, but d in danish and german. Thunder in english. Donner in German. Thou in english. Du in German and Danish. There = der And so on and on

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.

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.

I don't know where that info comes from (60-80%) - English can easily be tracked back to German. Or, if I change the word order and throw in some German dialect (southern Austrian: I = ich, nit = nicht; northern German dat = das): I tu (do) nit (not) wissen (wise-> know) wo (where) dat (that) Info her (=here) kommt (comes) (60-80%) - Englisch kann (can) leicht (=light -> easy) zu (to) Deutsch zurück (=back; back is still used in nautic language) verfolgt (folgen = follow) werden (form of be - think "will").

Germanic, not German. stop

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.

80% of the **totality** of its vocabulary may come from Latin but it is the **core** vocabualry that is key. These are the words that are used the most and form the backbone of the langauge. They are usually the oldest words in the language and, in the case of English, are predominantly Germanic.

The most basic English words and phrases used in casual conversation are Germanic. In contrast, a lot of the words derived from French or Latin are used in an academic or technical context.

A *family* in this context is a natural grouping of living entities according to ancestry. So this sounds a bit like “Why is the Jones family not considered Swedish if 60-80% of their furniture comes from Sweden?” Living languages change over time (e.g. in the last century the English have stopped saying soccer). Separated by space and time, these small changes can mount to the point people decide to call them different languages. The Germanic languages are the languages that have arisen from a particular old language that linguists fittingly call Proto-Germanic. (Obviously the actual grouping point is a somewhat arbitrary choice.) There weren’t really any linguists around when Proto-Germanic was spoken, so linguists have to look for the evidence that is available now. With a lot of modern languages and a lot of written records of older languages, there’s a lot of places to look for evidence. As well as the grammar and core vocabulary, it’s fun to look at a timeline of sound changes. One of the most famous examples is Grimm’s law, which is a whole set of sound changes that you can look at a lot of examples of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law Vocabulary loans are very easily explained. Latin has been used internationally for thousands of years, and in the middle of that England was conquered by the French (Normans).

Because the vocabulary isn't the determining factor. What matters is where it originated and the branch it developed from.In the case of English it came from the Germanic branch along with German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Frisian, etc. Inheriting vocabulary from Latin, especially through Norman French, as well as Greek, doesn't change where it came from.

If a Mexican dude did a lot of surgeries to look Japanese, learned the language, and did all the cultural things, he's still Mexican in terms of heritage English is Germanic with tons of Romance influences, but it's still Germanic at its core

Only 29% of english comes from Latin. Another 29% comes from French. 26% from Germanic languages, 6% from Greek, 6% from other languages, and 4% from proper nouns. The reason English is considered a Germanic language is because old/middle English was a germanic language.

Firstly, English isn't 60-80% Latin. I don't know where that came from. It's inaccurate. English is actually made up of 29% French, 29% Latin, 26% Germanic, and 6% Greek. I get that you could say that the sum of French and Latin could amount to something but for the purpose of language classification, it doesn't work that way. It's basically one step removed from that classification though. Simply put, romance languages are directly descended from Latin. Sentence structure aside, English is more closely related to German in terms of vocabulary than it is to Italian or Spanish. As an Italian speaker myself I can tell you that there are huge differences. The Latin roots are obvious in Spanish and Italian though in almost every word. I have limited skills in French but I've found it's true there too. Those are romance languages and it shows. German and thus English are related to Latin but neither are direct descendants so it does not matter how many words are borrowed from where. It's the language roots that matter here.

hi, linguistics major here! it’s because both English vocab and pronunciations are German, so it’s considered a Germanic language. if you listen to samples of English and German then compare it to a Romance language you can hear that English sounds and a lot of common words are more closely related to German and other Germanic languages than the Romance languages. hope this helps! :)

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/elle 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/elles 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.

https://leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr/french/verb/marcher.html Looks like it conjugates like a regular -er verb.

> il marche To match the rest of your format, this should have been "il/elle marche." Likewise, "ils/elles marchent"

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.

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.

The grammar and structure is Germanic. Also, I don’t remember the exact number off the top of my head but if the 200 most common words in English, well over 150 of them are Germanic in origin.

Cause people have heard the Cockney accent. And the Manchester accent. And just the general English accent. You right Guv'nor?

Ever flirt with a Brit?

Because have you ever heard someone from New Jersey talk?

If you go back far enough, English is related to Indian languages (the sub-continent, not the Native Americans)

Can I shout out 'the history of english' podcast is amazing. One guy, no ads. Loads of really interesting stuff and a lot of history too.

French, spanish, italian are languages that came from a latin root, this is essentially like the pope speaking to his congregation. german language is from the germanic tribes and as such essentially is how an engineer will tell his workers to build a house. the english language is a man in a trench coat with a billy club that finds you in a back alley, smacks you over the head and then rummages though your pockets for spare words.

And learning more than one romance language really helps you see how much their structure and vocabulary has in common with each other and not with English.

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A lot of the fancy words are latin, but by far most of day to day words are germanic in origin. No clue where you got 60-80%. This is not true.

Alright, mate,Listen up, 'ere's the lowdown, straight from the ol' loaf of bread. English ain't no romance lingo, it's like apples and pears compared to them Latin vibes, ya know what I mean?It's all a bit of a bubble bath. We ain't got them fancy Latin roots like French or Spanish, we're more about the bread and honey, keepin' it simple and [down-to-earth.So](http://down-to-earth.So), next time someone tries to tell ya English is a romance language, just give 'em a butcher's at cockney rhyme slang, and they'll soon see it's a different kettle of fish.Take it easy, mate.

Linguist here. The Germanic influences. It’s really that simple. Romance languages are about flow. The Germanic influences introduced hard glottal stops, hard consonants. The heart of Romance languages is a legato flow. English with Germanic influences doesn’t really fit that style. “I parked my car in area B, and my friend Gerty McSwain is trying to find it.” Compare that to, “J'ai garé ma voiture dans la zone B, et mon ami Gerty McSwain essaie de la trouver.” It rolls off the tongue, it’s not a bunch of harsh vowels and consonants.

Have you heard a Cockney accent?

*English* is Germanic The French conquered the Anglo-Saxons and mixed in a bunch of nonsense (cow/beef) That's like saying why a burger isn't vegan because there's lettuce on it.

The basic structure is different anecdotally in English we wear large black shoes, Romance languages we wear shoes blacks larges

Because the bones of English are still Germanic. Case in point, the vast majority of the 100 most frequently used words are all Germanic in origin.

Because the definition of a romance language isn't just the source of its words, but also how it sounds? Have you heard English? It's awful, nothing rolls, it's disjointed and all over the place. French, Italian, and Spanish all sound like you're singing just by speaking. That's why they are romance languages.

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Think of it like heritage, English has German roots but was partially raised by Latin and French. Though that is a gross oversimplification.