English is not Latin

In just about any conversation I have about European languages, somebody will inevitably declare that 'well, they all come from Latin'. Well, just for the record, English does not come from Latin. English is a West-Germanic language. Latin-based languages are called Romance Languages and the main ones are Spanish, Portugese, French, Italian, Romanian and Catalan.

Many people think English comes from Latin because of all the French words we've imported into the language. English has 27% lexical similarity to French, but actually 60% similarity to German [1]. Ha ha.. I wish English was cool enough to be a Romance Language too, but unfortunately English is more like a Bastard Language than anything else because of the way its been abused so much.

References

[1] http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eng

 

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About Roger Keays