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Re: [romconlang] is English a Romance language?



>On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 19:21:22  0000 rodlox <Babnol@hidden.email> wrote.
> seriously, is Engish (specifically late Medieval English) a Romance 
>Language?

No. It's Germanic, but with a heavy, multi-layer (mostly) French and Latin
vocabulary enlargement and replacement, plus many more borrowings (mostly
from relatively recent times) from other languages, like Greek (for a lot of
scientific, medical and technical terms), and pretty much every language
family on the planet -- Native American, Turkic, Malayo-Polynesian, Hindi,
Semitic, and various Asian and African languages. 

I don't actually know of any direct loans from Sumerian, Basque or
Burushaski (or any other isolates), but I'm prepared to accept willingly
that there are at least Basque (via French or Spanish) loans in use. Oddly,
I'm struggling to come up with Uralic and Caucasian loans, too.



Paul