Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios between the former and latter.

I think he's measuring the first, which gives a skewed picture, the latter is why english is considered a germanic language. The core of the language is all germanic words and you can still get by reasonably well without using any of the french/latin additions. Generally if a word is smaller and less 'fancy' it's of germanic origins, if it's longer and 'fancier' it's probably of romance origins.

iswydt

I actually am not sure of the subtleties on this grammatical point.

Even if you want to give this one to German, English also has the prospective aspect, which is missing in German (prospective "I'm going to play tennis", vs. perfective "I will play tennis").

What exactly do you mean by "aspect"?

> there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".

Sure:

-- (I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugué

-- (When I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugaba

-- (When I've) played (Tennis) ~~ jugado

English (like German) might say they need auxiliary words to explain what's going on, and Spanish people might say they're just conjugating the verb differently, but I think this is just because things are written down;

Because, if I say any of these sentences in Spanish or English rapidly enough, someone who does not know the language will not know where each word begins and ends, and it may just sound like English "conjugates" at the beginning of words and Spanish "conjugates" at the end. What's the real difference here?

> But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why [English is] not considered a Romance language than you imply.

I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a language, we're not really talking about something that will help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're really just yapping about geography and time.

So what do you think would be different if English was more widely considered a Romance language?

I'm honestly getting a lot of responses here from people who clearly don't have a good grasp of linguistics, but you take the cake by composing a long-form response without at least bothering to Google the terms I have used.

    I think most of the time  
    people talk about the  
    "rules" of a language, we're
    not really talking about  
    something that will help  
    acquire the language (or be  
    better understood): we're  
    really just yapping about  
    geography and time.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect

I think that's complicated by the fact that many english words of latin origin were inherited from a germanic source and thus from an intelligibility standpoint the overlap between english and dutch or german is partially additive with latin. e.g. [1]

Unfortunately the source is dead, but at one point a study ranked english/german as 60% lexical similarity compared to english/french at 27% [2]. Anecdotally, I think dutch and german are easier for an english speaker because of comparatively more overlap in simple words. Heavy use of compound words in dutch/german also gives an english listener a better chance of recognizing part of the word and inferring the meaning from context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Latinates_of_G...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

Where is the verb marking you speak of? Because I don't see any difference between played and played. Your example of how English uses auxiliary verbs to convey different verb aspects is a Germanic construct. I don't really understand how you use this as an example of Romance lineage in English.

And it's different in that "have" implies some sort of connection to the present. You wouldn't say "When I was a kid, I have played a lot of video games." You'd say "When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games."

I don't think this should imply a Romance connection, though, as Germanic languages do it, too. Using "have" and a participle seems like more of an areal feature to languages from Western Europe.

In German, this doesn't happen. Imperfect tense is often formed by using a "-te" ending to the verb (so "spiel(en)" -> "spielte"), while the past participle prepends "ge-" and appends "t" or "en" (so "gespielt" - (I have) "played"). The form "... was playing" would also exist, "... war spielen", and again with a difference how the infinitive is formed (-ing vs. -en).

To me, grammar of temporal forms in English is more Romance-language than German language. The fact that English lost any form of case, and most of gender, is neither German nor Romance though.

I sometimes used to joke with English friends that the language is the least common denominator of all the people overrunning the Island in the last 3000 years. Use a bit of everything, leave all the hard stuff out, and write it in a nonphonetic way like Irish.

In English, in contrast, there is a clear difference in usage between, say, "I was playing tennis while my kids were in school", and "I have played tennis while my kids were in school".

That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by whom but it was once pointed out to me that in some genres - ranging from drinking songs to nursery rhymes - the words that come from Old English often make up more than 90% of the words. Similarly, if you sample the dialog in a kitchen or office while people gossip the ratio is also going to skew heavily like 70 - 80% Germanic. (Japanese shows a similar effect with all its Chinese vocabulary.)

Indeed, it's not tricky to write about everyday grounded things with nothing but straight Anglo-Saxon roots. (I've been doing it so far this whole paragraph -- oh that's Greek.) Difficult to achieve similar results utilizing exclusively Latinate vocabulary.

Of course, a history book or engineering manual will be different, and Graeco-Latin vocabulary might well be in the majority there.

the language backbone is still Germanic