Or via anything else, really. E.g. the word for car "kocsi" seems oddly similar to Spanish "coche" (I think French would be voiture) and "tombola" to mean "bingo" seems Italian (french/english should be raffle, I think).
Spanish is considered a "Romance" language, along with French, Italian int al. English is considered a "Germanic" language along with German, Dutch int al. English alone has at least three major periodic based "versions" - Old, Middle, Modern. There were also events such as a major vowel change where the way we pronounce vowels today differs from before that event.
Spanish seems to have a famed "lisp". However that simplistic approach to a complex language and Spain as a whole ignores rather a lot of history, culture and is frankly an insult! As we say in Britain - "Viva la difference".
English as spoken in Britain and elsewhere should borrow and bother from every language it ever trips over. It should always evolve and mutate and continue to become ever more flexible. It should also continue to enable useful "pidgins" which are amalgams of English bolted on the side of another language and vice versa.
What English seems to have lost compared to the other Germanics is a lot of formal complicated verb conjugations and nounal declensions and noun genders and quite a lot more. Complexity can be bolted on but it is optional. Subject object verb is also quite fluid too in English. I believe German at least insists on a verb dump at the end of a sentence. English still has many of these structures - active, passive, subjunctive verbs (transitive, intrans etc); Nom, Voc, Acc, Gen, Dat, Abl for your nouns but they are largely implied via other words instead of suffixes.
English is quite literally and vocally French!
(lingua franca - language of the Franks)
Spanish does not have a lisp. During the medieval age, in the territory that would be called Spain in the future, there were several dialects (or "norms") of Spanish. One of them pushed for seseo (no /θ/, "th" as in think) and other for a combined approach. The latter was chosen by a king (Alfonso X the wise), and the rest is history.
However, all dialectal varieties are accepted by the RAE (Royal Academy of Spanish) jointly with the Spanish Academies of the American Continent regulates the language (like the Académie française for the French language).
So, in Seville (Spain) most people does not use the /θ/ sound, as in Venezuela, for example.
To sum up, please stop saying "Spanish has a lisp" because it has the same "lisp" than English or other languages with the sound /θ/.
Some of it is a social division that originates back to the Norman conquest of Britain. The guy in the field would call a cow's heart (the Old English equivalent of) a cow's heart. The lord would call it the (Norman French equivalent) of coeur de beouf. His doctor or priest would probably speak French or English but would write in Latin. Cordis bovem (or something I don't Latin).
From this mishmash modern English has cow, beef, bovine, heart, cardiac (Greek but clearly influenced by Latin cor). The original Anglo-Saxon word for cow, beef from French to refer to the meat of cow, and bovine from Latin, the fancy adjective. So even now a thousand years later, an overwrought academic writes of a cardiac arrest experienced by a bovine (Graeco-Latin), while in normal speech we might say the cow's heart gave out (Anglo-Saxon).
Something like "nephropathology induced by neurofibromatosis" was/is a sort of guild jargon or cant. It just means kidney disease caused by fibrous tumours of the nerves disease. Of course, you then lose the precision. How I put it is not unambiguous like neurofibromatosis is. A precise jargon is necessary anyway, and will often be misleading to the uninitiated. I can see why doctors just keep their cant.
[0]https://www.etymonline.com/word/bi-?ref=etymonline_crossrefe... [1]https://www.etymonline.com/word/bicycle
Also there were no bicycles in ancient Grece, that's why the word is different in modern Greek, but kyklos is still a greek word with the same meaning.
Old words come from German, because we were part of AustroHungary. Old-but-reformed words come from Czech, because in the 1800's we wanted to stop being so Germanic. Somewhat old words come from Serbo-Croatian, because we were part of Yugoslavia. Modern words come from English, because internet.
So we have a language where words you use around the home are often germanic, jokes and swear words are south slavic, and anything to do with computers is english.
Plus a few French words here and there from the time of Napoleon.
And in other areas, like the arts (from painting and photography to film and the novel), legal, and political terms. That's because France in those past 2-3 centuries was a huge power in Europe and globally, along with the UK).
For France, this ended with WWI and was a done deal with WWII but there was still some momentum up to the 70s.
So it was kind of like countries today copy US terms, fashion, politics, music, etc.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll
What English had and still has, and say, Romanian, doesn't, is the wide exposure.
Romanian was traditionally spoken in the region of Romania, so Eastern Europe, with some interaction with Central Europe, Southern Europe, Even-More-Eastern Europe, the Middle East. So those are the influences, plus some recent additions from international languages such as French or English.
English, on the other hand, was needed to describe and interact with Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Souther Europeans, Native North Americans, Pygmys, Indians, Native Australians, Chinese, Japanese, Incas, Ethiopians, etc and their associated environments and lifestyles.
If you saw curry, you needed to either come up with a word or adopt theirs. Or avocado. Avocado wasn't even a word in Romanian until 2000-something, I'm quite sure.
Admit I can't come up with an example at the moment though.
That also happens in other languages, too, but English has a great affinity.
I think that's just drive by English having, what, 40-50 sounds? Which is quite a lot for a language, and English speakers having a huge aversion towards words with many syllables. 1 is perfect, 2 is okish, 3 is a lot, 4+ is an abomination.
So they tend to import anything they can pronounce and is under 3 syllables.
Despite another responder’s assertion that William the Conquerer was Norse, the fact is that he spoke French. So you had a ruler who didn’t even speak English, and a ruling class that was familiar with French.
Which, by the way, is why English names for animals and their meats are such a mess. For the most part the peasants raised the animals and the aristocracy ate them (still an era when protein deficiency limited the upward mobility of peasants). So animal names are from one linguistic root and meat names from another. Sheep/mutton, cow/beef, pig/pork,ham.
* when do I have to give it back?
* Is it "by permission"
* do I have a library card limit how many I can borrow?
* can I borrow from the 'enfer' shelves? (there's a loan word...)
I'd say "steal" is a better fit. The word isn't coming back. Capice?
'borrowed' carries the same implications with a down-note on the giving back.
taken, adopted, brought in, co-opted... there's a thesaurus of choices which to my way of thinking do a better job of describing english's habit of .. adopting other languages words.
the key point is that gate-keeping in english doesn't work. we don't have the academie francais to police loanwords, and nobody gets to say loan or borrow words are bad, and that better ones exist: they are what they are.
I'm really just howling at the moon. (I wonder if howl and moon, in some sense are loan words from latin, or anglo saxon)
And of course, British English has both pot au feu and pho.
You see this a lot with modern Greek. As an example, appointment is ραντεβού, and elevator is ασανσέρ.
I was watching the subtitled video of a speech made by a Hungarian minister recently and the few words that I could make sense of were all similar to the their French counter-parts (or how I would think a French technical word loaned into Hungarian would sound like). Ditto for German, even more so, I'd say. Russian, too.
In fact even a word that we've now stopped regarding as "technical", such as bicycle [1], comes in English via modern French (so not via the French spoken by the Normans back in the day):
> Borrowed from French bicycle (modern bicyclette), from bi- (“bi-”) + cycle (“cycle”). First attested in English in 1868, and in French in 1847.